Last winter I was walking through a park near my apartment when I came across five young boys attempting to smash an
Granted, Chicago children are probably more violent than most, but I am not used to
particular neighborhood. I jogged over to them mostly out of curiosity, but also to make sure they weren’t torturing some poor
something. If I had known the sort of thing I was about to come in contact with I would have probably went home and bolted the door.
One of the boys was clutching some sort of dark wooden board covered with black paint, and holding it at arms length with his face turned away and
eyes
his
remember one of his friends calling him either
aggressively prying the hammer out of the hands of the boy who had been swinging
moments earlier while the other two kids watched without saying a word. In spite of all the hammering and arguing, the surface
perfectly smooth and intact from the angle I was approaching. I put on my toughest adult voice and got the kids to quit yelling
hammer just long enough to ask them what in the hell they were trying to do.
The boy holding the hammer (Peter or Paul) looked me straight in the face and said, “we’re gonna break the devil into six pieces and bury him in the woods.”
stunned
was
I
figured he had seen something like this on television and sort of laughed it off as I asked, “so you kids thing this plank is the devil?”
Peter or Paul was clearly not pleased by this question and said something along the lines of “Are you stupid or what? That thing aint a plank!” As I took my first look at the wooden board up close I was surprised to see that the entire surface had not been painted with black paint as I had at first thought.
painted to the point that it was nearly covered
familiar with. It looked vaguely Asian or middle-eastern. It was entirely alien to me aside from the upper left and right corners,
detailed paintings of the sun and moon. In the center of both the sun and moon were unnerving
expressions. As I thought about this last detail it became clear to me that this board was some sort of antique hand-made Ouija.
Peter or Paul explained to me that his grandfather owned an antique store and was
requested that the boy’s mother take this board from
break it into six pieces and dispose of it immediately, burying each piece in the woods not less than a mile apart from each other. He would not say why this had to
referred to the board as “that wooden devil.” When
refused, thinking it ludicrous as any rational person would, the grandfather had enlisted the boy and his friends, given them the store key, and told them the safe combination. I remember he kid telling me he was disappointed; he had always thought the safe held his grandfather’s stash
treasure.
Upon grabbing the wooden board from the safe, however, the boys had run into two problems. Firstly, the board was hard as stone and the best way to break the thing was
point of
hammer had failed. The second issue was that woods in Chicago are scarce, and woods large enough for burying things miles apart from each other are even scarcer.
