Planchette design with dotwork scrollwork

You will think I have lost my wits, so I will set it down plainly. Mr Pardoe's sale at the rectory yielded a box of his late wife's things, and at the bottom lay a board painted black and gilt, with a little heart-shaped pointer on three felt feet. The waves round its edges look like the sea off Cromer when the wind gets up. On Thursday I lit the lamp, and Margaret from the post office and I sat with two fingers apiece on the wood and asked the usual foolish questions.

Nothing answered for a long while. Then the pointer slid, not to a letter, but up the long line in the middle, down to the circle at the crown where the lamp made a white pool, and round it, and round again, the way a cat circles a basket before it settles. Margaret said it was the crescent moons that drew it. I said the moons were only painted. She took her hand away and would not put it back.

Last night I went to the rectory alone to return the box. The wood was cold. In the dust on the underside, beneath the felt, someone had scratched a crescent with a nail, and beside it a single word in a hand I do not know, though it looked very like mine: Forest. I have not walked into the beech wood past Marsh Lane since I was a girl, and I do not mean to go now.

Yet my fingers keep stretching towards the pencil drawer. This morning the pointer was not where I had left it, and the moons on it had been filled in, black as the circle over the pool of light. Come up if you can. I would rather not be the only one who sees it.