There are many things you could call Wilfred.
A loser? Certainly.
A coward? Absolutely.
A dumbass? A little colourful, but along the right lines.
But one could never call him the superstitious type.
Ironically, he'd linger around the occult club back in high school like a ghost or an omen for someone who didn't share a certain post to ten people, just to bombard them with proof that their sole beliefs were as fake as the popular girl's spray tan.
Finding his resolute and unwavering confidence in his own beliefs, the club welcomed him and attacked him back with their constant video-sighted evidence and witness statements from victims. He'd begrudgingly listen to it all and debate back, but looking back on it now, that was the only time Wilfred didn't seem so much like a loser nor a coward. He had sheer confidence in his eyesight and his senses, knowing full-well that if one cannot see a ghost, and all the documented sightings were just blurs caused from the sticky fingers of cameramen, what are the chances that they actually exist?
But as time went on, his eyesight grew blurrier until he was as dependant on glasses as an unemployed man would be on government benefits – if his own eyesight didn't work, surely his other senses would waver too. Adult life made his bones grow tired and the constant search for employment made him dejected.
They say that ghosts circulate around depressed and resentful people – he was not resentful per say, but he had enough loneliness to attract spirits. He didn't believe that at first, but now he was hunched over a Ouija board with much anticipation and anxiousness, wouldn't that mean he was scared? But there's no way ghosts exist, so he used that as the rope to climb out of this pit of doubt he seemed to be stuck in.
"Are you scared? I thought you didn't believe in ghosts?" A girl enquired, her petite figure hunched over while attempting to light a match with obvious frustration and letting out a satisfied hum when a spark filled the darkness.
"I don't!" He retaliated back, yet his body betrayed him with a shiver running down his spine, causing him to peer around like a startled deer caught in the headlights of a suicidal maniac's car.
I bet you're wondering how the ever so adamant Wilfred 'I'd-rather-shoot-myself-than-believe' Wilson got roped up in the situation of being alone with someone in a dismal boxed apartment room with a Ouija board as company. The answer is quite simple – a girl.
Not just any girl. It was Wilfred's high school crush and the other reason he hung around the occult club like a parasite leaching off a host – it's been somewhere between four to five years since he graduated high school, and she happened to go to the same university as him. Sure, he was focused on IT, but the liberal arts department wasn't too far from his block, so they met up often.
But liking her meant he'd have to suppress his constant need to berate her useless knowledge on demons and ghosts, sucking it up with a forced grin and nodding alone until the inside of his cheek bled from the suppression of childish insults.
He'd simply follow two rules when listening to her:
One - Absentmindedly nod and furrow his eyebrows, indicating that he was indulging in her trivia.
Two – Say 'Oh, I never thought about it like that!'
Simply repeating these steps helped keep him glued to her side for the past few years, working almost too efficiently since he managed to get her alone plenty of times. But, as stated before, he was a coward. Just as he would be about to mention some ignorant poetic quote he found online, she'd usher him to some voodoo doll or nonsensical cursed object she found from a pawn shop.
Outwardly, he'd grin and nod but internally, he'd be sobbing worser than a mother yanking a baby's pacifier away.
An avid example of such a moment was right now, in which they were alone together in her apartment. Her roommate left for the night, leaving the perfect opportunity for Wilfred to express his romantic prowess (admittedly, from Hallmark movies he'd watch with his mother every Christmas), but luck never favoured Wilfred since they were hunched over a Ouija board.
The calligraphy from the curled letters jutted out under the illumination of the candlelight, making him slightly intimidated at the image of some haggard old witch creating it with paint from a sacrificial summoning. He shook his head – perhaps the incense she lit earlier was laced with some hallucination drug that made him stray away from his perfect, cynical ideals.
"Hey, Lottie, do we… um… have to?" Wilfred murmured.
"Yep." She hummed, seemingly not paying attention to whatever he was saying and pouring all her attention into the activity of lighting candles around them. Wilfred gulped.
He hated this.
That seemed far too harsh... he abhorred it.
He despised it with all his being. As much as he cared for Lottie, he couldn't handle her incessant need to tamper into the occult, horror and conspiracies.
He gazed at her, illuminating from the candlelight in the darkness and focusing on her every feature.
Her eyes were as bright as the day they met, eager and mischievous, her hair tumbled down her shoulders like a frizzy fiery waterfall, untamed from the grips of a hairbrush for weeks giving him the slight tinge of fear that it would set on fire given the hunched position over the candles she had taken up to reach the candles at the far back, and her face was scrunched up in a way suggesting she was intently fixed upon reading the instructions of the board. She had her legs crossed, making the rip in her jeans stand out more, given the fact that she had merely scraped it while trekking in the woods and not just a fashion statement. Her Beatles shirt was faded and tucked into her jeans, and the darkness of the shirt contrasted with the paleness of her skin, highlighted red at the elbows and cheeks of her face.
He liked her a lot.
Heart in a frenzy, he grinned to himself.
This was love, he was adamant on that fact.
So he sat down patiently, waiting for her to give him instructions.
Looking up, she grinned. Tearing his eyes away from her figure, he stared at a candle next to him and watched as the wax tore itself away and dripped along the rim of it, staining her living room carpet.
"Okay, so I think I get how this works." Lottie exclaimed after a few minutes of excruciating silence, tossing the instruction sheet onto the sofa behind her and finally, finally, looking at him, "Ready, Willie?"
He gulped again.
"Y'know maybe, just saying, we shouldn't do it?" He meekly suggested, blinking at rates he never thought was possible so that it slowed down, like snippets from an old movie. He frowned as her face fell. Oh no.
Wilfred quickly shot her a reassuring grin and placed his left hand on the planchette and motioning to the board with his right one.
"Just kidding," He nervously chuckled, staring down so he wouldn't have to look at her disappointed face again which would shatter his thumping heart, "I mean, we didn't buy a Ouija board for nothing!"
Silently screeching at himself for not having the courage to yank the board away from her and heroically bring back the traditional 'movie and confession' trope he'd always seen, he gulped once more.
She was smiling widely now, a grin spread across her face so much as he thought her cheeks were basically gone. He returned it with a curt nod and his lips tugged upwards to a tight-lipped smile, eyes now returning to the board.
Wilfred was mortified, he hated meddling into the whole ideals of the supernatural. He doesn't believe in it, but moments like this bring him back to when he was an eight year old and firmly believed that there was, in fact, a slithery demon in his closet and a pompous, government-official type under his bed.
His mother was a firm believer of ghosts, often responding to his question of 'are ghosts real?' as he was hunched over his bed, getting ready to sleep, with either a finger to her lip, signifying that it was a secret, or just simply whisper a soft 'Yes, now go to sleep hon, you have school tomorrow.'
Fat chance, he used to think, unable to fall into a state of slumber from the heat given from under his blanket. But he refused to stick his head out to breathe fresh, cold air since he feared that if he did that, he'd open his eyes and see something on the ceiling.
Although he never did poke his 8 year old head out, he imagined what that ghost would look like, hands and legs stuck to the ceiling like spiderman, head in the opposite direction of its body with long, wiry black hair falling downwards, and through the strands, he'd see a toothy grin. A grin that spread across its face, tearing into the flesh of its cheek with blood dripping from both cheeks onto his forehead and staining his large glasses laying on his bedside which would make it useless to fumble to get it. So, he'd stare into its abyss of eyes, hollow and empty as its mutilated body contorted in ways to turn and drop onto him-
He shuddered; his eyes now wide behind rectangular specs as Lottie began speaking.
Voice dimming out into background noise, Wilfred scolded himself internally for being such a coward. He wasn't afraid of ghosts, he was just afraid of embarrassing himself. That was certainly the reason, Wilfred convinced himself.
"Spirits of this hou-apartment?" She interrupted herself with a soft snort in an attempt to be funny, but only to be met with Wilfred's nervous chuckle as he ran a hand down his goose bump infested arm. She continued, "We would like to communicate with you, so if you could give us a sign?"
Both their hands were placed on the planchette, eyes trained on the board with such intense focus that they felt the board would break under pressure. Tap, tap, tap.
Wilfred jumped, startled and eyes widened to the extent that you could scarcely see his pupil. Lottie snorted with laughter, pointing with her thumb towards the sink of the attached kitchen.
"Just a leaky faucet." She whispered; eyes crinkled as she threw her head back in laughter while Wilfred's face burned.
"Oh." He mumbled, tilting his head away from a judgmental gaze and silently cursing himself for being such a wimp and coward.
'A leaky faucet, you dumbass!' He cried to himself, feeling shameful.
He didn't believe in ghosts since he wore braces, and he certainly wouldn't start now.
But a leaky faucet was the only rational explanation for the strange occurrences.
The planchette then moved.
The silence caused it to be the loudest sound echoing louder than the pitter patter of the tap, filling the room. Wilfred snapped his head back to the board, eyebrows furrowed as he let out an uneasy chortle, assuming that it was just Lottie trying to spook him out, but all his worst fears was realized when he noticed she was shocked, hunched over the board and trying to pinpoint the letter.
Wilfred froze.
Did he accidentally drag the planchette?
No, his fingers were firm. If there was one guaranteed fact, it was the fact that Wilfred had an ungodly sense of control over his own body.
Did she move it?
Urgently, he glanced at Lottie's fingers on the planchette and found it loosely shadowed above it.
Confusedly, he kept his eyes trained on it until a lightbulb appeared above his head – 'Ah, I must be seeing things… maybe my glasses are fogging, Lottie clearly moved it.'
"H? Is that H or J?" She pondered aloud, looking at him with a scrunched expression as if she found this normal after a few seconds of visible shock.
He let out a shaky breath.
But just as he was about to peer forward, a shiver ran down his spine. His left shoulder had an immeasurable amount of pressure on it, as if someone had rested their entire weight on it.
Wilfred froze.
He looked at Lottie, or more specifically, where her hands were placed. One on her chin, tapping it lightly, whilst the other was resting on the planchette.
Then who… who was behind him?
Whirling his head to the left, darkness consumed his vision since the candle refused to aid him there. Like a creaking door, he lingered for a few moments before turning back to the board.
However this time, the darkness seemed all the more intimidating in the scarce illumination of the candlelight, flickering here and there and making it seem like there was more than two figures in the room.
Unnerved by this, Wilfred jerked back and kicked his leg forward as a way of stumbling to his feet. This sudden movement caused the planchette to knock itself out of Lottie's ghost of a grip, throwing itself across the room and against the wall.
The glass at the centre shattered.
Sound resonating across the apartment, Wilfred stared dumbfoundedly at the shattered glass pieces, glistening with multiple images of Lottie's startled expression.
"W… WILFRED! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?" Lottie shrieked, lunging to the side of the wall to pick up the pieces of the shattered glass, "Y… you- Do you know what you've done?! Breaking such an expensive thing, are-are you going to pay for it?! Not only that, the number of malevolent spirits you've just released! I can't even begin to…"
Wilfred tuned her out, his head beginning to throb incessantly from the high pitch of her voice.
Murmuring multiple apologies beneath his breath, he tried stumbling to his feet to help her with the pieces but miscalculated the distance and ended up knocking down the candle. The flame hit the end of the board, the edge not catching fire easily, but Wilfred didn't notice for a while. This was enough time for the flame to crawl onto the cardboard and litter it with an ash grey to jet-black pieces of dust.
Eyes widening, Wilfred subconsciously stamped it out with his foot and waited till the flames died out.
'Just my goddamn luck', he mentally cursed himself.
Darkness enveloped the apartment, but he didn't need light to see the crestfallen expression of the girl, whose hands soon dropped the glass pieces.
She was seething.
Wilfred realized he had done something very wrong.
His incessant fear for the dark was replaced by the fear of Lottie.
"Y…YOU-"
Knowing he was about to get a vigorous scolding, so he prepared himself to tune out his mind and began to reach for his wallet to pay for expenses and leave before she exploded once more.
She harshly grabbed the crinkled up dollar bills in his palm and shot him a repulsed look.
"I can't believe you…" She murmured under her breath.
Wilfred sent her another apologetic look with sweat trailing down his face.
"I'll leave now." He nervously chuckled, rubbing the nape of his neck and trying to carefully manoeuvre through the darkness nimbly, "I don't want to mess anything else up."
However, as he looked back, he swore he spotted a figure in the shadows above the broken glass, just beyond her. Its body was tilted to the right in an abnormal fashion, almost mutilated, that he could only make out due to the candlelight. He'd try pass it off as a possible hallucination from staring into the darkness for so long, but he could swear that he spotted it place a long, oddly shaped finger to its (where he presumed it to be) mouth and among the silence and Lottie's cursing, he heard a soft 'Shh.'
'I must be seeing things,' he comforted himself before shutting the door behind him.