Smoke Signals

 

This was supposed to be a secret that I should carry to the grave, because in 5^th grade, we promised each other to never mention to any soul whatever devilish thing we did.  But we were 10 then, so oh well. There goes my excuse.  I am pretty sure that nobody even remembers this anymore, might as well make fun of it.  

At the time, everything felt so illegal, more so, I felt I could be ex-communicated from the Catholic Church because we engaged in an activity that, to me, was demonic.  So demonic it compelled me to rush to confession and tell the priest that I engaged in some form of a taboo ritual, and he had all the right to flag me to death and command me to pray ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Mary’s while walking on my knees from the back of the church to the altar to cleanse me of my sins.    

The sin?  I participated in a “Spirit of the Glass” session.  Yep, you heard that right.  Spirit of the Glass.  We summoned the supernatural, which I am pretty sure was not an approved after school program.  In other countries, the Spirit of the Glass is the equivalent of the Ouija board.  And since I came from a third world nation, the board was an improvised construction paper that we wrote letters on using a Sharpie. 

I can’t remember how I got mixed up with this crowd because as far as I could remember, I was not friends with them. I may have heard one of them when they were concocting this idea and I may have intentionally planned to stay later that day so they forcibly and reluctantly invited me to the ritual.  Instead of having an eyewitness that would tell on our teachers, I may have lured them to get me involved in their Spirit Questing thus protecting their little secret.  That term Spirt Quest were still not a “thing” but we may have been the pioneers in our school.  We were questors and we were hunting for ghosts.    As to the legitimacy of it, I was not that certain. 

                                                                                                                     

I think there were six of us (six souls in hell?).  We conducted the rites at the tiny house of our school janitor who was living at the back of the property.  Two of the girls were close to him and they somehow managed to shoo him away from his house and we were able to “summon the spirit” from his front porch. 

I still remember how it went. 

First, we got a briefing from Jane (not her real name).  Instructions were clear that this was a top-secret activity and no one should know about what we were doing, which was like saying, “eat your vegetables” to a toddler and him doing the opposite.  And that we were willing to accept all the consequences in participating in this mystical activity, which can swing either ways: an Exorcist ending wherein one of us would levitate while speaking inappropriate NSFW chants in an obscure language; or the introduction to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid where we will annoy each other by asking “why?” to every statement.  

Jane began by lighting a match to burn a piece of paper.  There might have been a prayer or incantation written on it but I failed to see whatever it was.  I will not be able to tell you what devilish things were written on them.  Or it may have been her grocery list for the day or an inventory of people she hated whom she wanted to throw voodoo spells on.  Who knew? 

 

After lighting the paper, she put it inside the glass, which was turned upside down, extinguishing the fire and trapping the smoke inside it.  The glass was nestled along the made-up Ouija board and it was resting under an illustrated circle that said “home”.  At the back of my mind, I was thinking, “Oh, we’re summoning an English-speaking spirit, how fancy”, otherwise, “home” would have been in Tagalog. 

On each side of the “home” base were the words, “yes” and “no”.  And along the borders of the paper are the letters of the alphabet.  I could not recall if they were in alphabetical order or if they were spelled to say “only stupid kids believe this shit”. 

At that age, I was mesmerized by the fact that the smoke stayed inside the glass, swirling around as if some ghostly entity was hovering in it and waiting to possess us.  Then Jane asked us to hold hands and recite the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary and Glory Be but she made sure that neither of us punctuate the prayer with an “Amen”.  She said that this was necessary to the process.    Someone really did her research, I thought, very impressed.  Or someone else was really that gullible to believe that this form of prayer was summoning the spirits beyond. 

Half of the group were my classmates and the other half, including Jane belonged to a class above us.  It was awkward for me, as I have said, because I was never close to them.  I only knew Jane because one time she commented on the Brown Scapular I was wearing. 

She said, “What’s that?”

“It’s supposed to save me from purgatory”, my response as an obedient Catholic kid. 

All she did was smile, so obscure I couldn’t place what it meant, and said, “cool”. 

Then here we were, at the back of the school ready to witness the supernatural.  I wanted to have a first-hand experience on this because no matter how hard I tried, I never had the gift of sixth sense.  This spirit questing was as close as I could get to paranormal activity- a smoke trapped in the glass. 

(I think I am fortunate not to have these gifts because I will pee my pants at just the thought of having a ghost sitting next to me waiting to unload his or her burdens about the after-life.) 

Jane then instructed us to place our left index fingers on top of each other’s fingers with her own as the base for all of us to lean on.  But instructions were clear not to touch the glass.  Then she proceeded to talk to the person, or the spirit that was supposedly trapped inside it. 

In English, she said, “Spirit of the Glass, are you in there?” The Spirit, I then confirmed, was probably from Ateneo and spoke fluent English.  Or we might have summoned some entity from Guam, which was the closest English-speaking territory from the country because the glass started responding to the question.  It moved towards the “yes” spot but at a very glacial pace. 

We all then looked at each other, fear and concern flooded our faces.  For me, the fear was mixed with excitement.  I couldn’t believe that the glass was moving towards the direction of “yes” without anyone pushing it.  My classmates looked like they were about to get their panties bunched up.  They were scared shit.  The glass was moving, or was somebody was moving it?  As far as I knew, it was not the people outside the glass because no one was touching it.  It was forbidden by Jane.  All our fingers were on top of each other’s and Jane’s was the one guiding us.  Whoever Metusellah character we have imprisoned in that fragile container was moving it.  For sure.  For sure?

The travel from Home to Yes took almost 15 minutes.  Steam did not move as fast as we wanted.  We all grew impatient.  We wanted to abort the mission.  Unfortunately, Jane did not research on how to terminate the ceremony when the participants got fidgety.  So we all looked at each other. 

Someone said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”  Translation: I’m bored.  

Then one replied, “Are we just letting this ghost escape the glass?”

“What if it’s a bad spirit, and it starts to haunt us?  Worse, what if it possesses us?”

We all stopped to think. 

What should we do? 

Jane looked at my direction and then her gaze moved down into the scapular I was wearing.  She suggested that we should use it against the spirit and dangle it over the smoke once the glass is removed.  I surrendered to her the only protection I had against the devil. 

Then, she moved the scapular on top of the glass while someone else slowly released the smoke from the upside-down container.  Jane kept moving my talisman over the smoke as if it’s an incense.  We all screamed as everything unfolded because of fear that anyone of us could be the next Linda Blair.  Immediately, we started running away from the site leaving our evidence behind.

I did not look back.  I ran as fast as I could until I reached the school entrance and that’s the only time I checked if all of us made it. 

Everyone ran in different directions and we lost track of the people from the upper class. 

I was tired and scared.  I was more scared of the consequences of being involved in this spirit questing than the actual ritual itself.  What bothered me was that we left the make-shift Ouija board, the glass, and the matches at the janitor’s home. 

It left me anxious for about a week.  I wanted to tell my best friend about what we did but we swore that it would be our secret.  This meant that we could not even confess this to the priest as we might be given the maximum penance, which for me, reciting the rosary in English and avoiding the Saturday Morning Cartoons.  But it was killing me not to unburden myself of this dilemma.  What if the spirit was still lingering at the Janitor’s home?  And what if it got a hold of my scapular and decided to hunt down its owner?

When I saw the other Questors at school, they ignored me, as if nothing happened. 

I couldn’t bear it.  And because I was Catholic and guilt was part of our ministry, I trooped down to the church and confessed this sin.  Of course, I threw in some other sins along the way to downplay the severity of the event, because I was sure that what we did was worthy of capital punishment. 

I thought the priest might have misheard me because the penance he gave me was very standard.  So I reminded him again that I played The Spirit of the Glass.  I think his response was, “good for you”.  Either he laughed at how juvenile the deed was or he did not understand what a spirit of the glass was.  I was not in the mood to explain how the whole thing transcribed and what it meant, so I let it pass.  Besides, I did not want to hold the line of the confession box as there were some other souls behind me, waiting to confess their own sins, trying to avoid hell in time for Easter.  

I felt relief after that.  That was all I needed to do- break a promise after breaking the ritual.  In fact, none of us ended up having our heads rotate 360 degrees after that ordeal. 

 

Now, a few weeks later, the janitor mentioned about the cardboard letters left in his front porch.  He knew what it was.  And he laughed at the thought of it. 

I did not confront him.  But my classmate, who was with me then asked, “Do you think the glass actually moved on its own?”

I told him that I did not push it. 

Neither did he. 

But he wondered if Jane and company were responsible for the movement.  Since none of us touched the glass.  

Then I thought about Jane.  My brown scapular.  The fingers on top of each others’ and Jane’s at the very bottom.  Then her smile, unreadable at the time, but now I knew what it was all about.   

All I said was, if I had known the words then, “Bitch.”

 

April 18, 2022

Copyright June 2022