The Painting
By Ashley Cotter-Cairns

I was involved with a girl a couple of years older than me who I met at my first workplace. She was a sort of amateur occultist, Tarot, tea leaves and so on and offered to teach me how to use an ouija board.

She had me totally enthralled (the occult stuff really had little to do with my fascination, to be honest!), so I agreed. We mucked about with it for a while, but I came away feeling a bit neutral about the whole deal.

Maybe a week later, she phoned me up out of the blue and said she'd been experimenting with the board again.

"Oh yeah," I said. "What happened?"

"I spoke to your grandfather."

This made me feel less certain of myself. My grandfather had died a couple of years before and I still lived with my grandmother in their house.

"What did he say?" I asked.

"He said he is going to send you a message at exactly seven this evening."

I hung up, a little surprised by the conversation but not expecting anything to happen and put the whole thing out of my mind.

That evening, my grandmother and I were watching TV and eating from trays, when we heard a loud thump from upstairs.

My grandmother looked at me. "Did you hear that?" she asked.

"Yes," I replied and looked at the clock on the video recorder. It was precisely 7pm.

I was maybe 18 at the time and I admit my stomach clenched as I rose to my feet and gathered what bravado I could. I think I picked up a walking stick from the hallway as a potential weapon (or this might just be my imagination adding colour two decades later).

I crept upstairs and found a painting lying on the carpet. Then I swept the other rooms and found nothing out of order. I picked up the large framed canvas and carried it back downstairs to show my grandmother.

"This painting fell off the wall," I explained.

"Your grandfather painted that in France," she told me.

We checked the hook and the wire, but nothing was amiss. I hung it back up and said nothing to my grandmother about the ouija board.

But I chose to interpret my grandfather's message as: "Don't mess with what you don't understand."

As a post-script, I'd love to say that there was something odd about the painting, something that led me on a Da Vinci Code-esque adventure to find a hidden family fortune. But no. It was a vague, almost sketch-like watercolour of some distant mountains.

On second thought, those peaks could have been the tail of the Loch Ness Monster. Or maybe he painted over a Van Gogh for want of a clean canvas.

Grandfather, if you're listening, maybe you can send me another message...

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