Gran's box

Last winter I was walking through a park near my apartment when I came across five young boys attempting to smash an object with a hammer. Granted, Chicago children are probably more violent than most, but I am not used to seeing such things in my particular neighborhood. I jogged over to them mostly out of curiosity, but also to make sure they weren't torturing some poor squirrel or a pigeon or 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 his eyes closed. A second boy (I remember one of his friends calling him either Peter or Paul) was aggressively prying the hammer out of the hands of the boy who had been swinging at the wooden board moments earlier while the other two kids watched without saying a word. In spite of all the hammering and arguing, the surface of the board looked perfectly smooth and intact from the angle I was approaching. I put on my toughest adult voice and got the kids to quit yelling and fighting over the 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.' I was stunned but also amused. 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. It was actually hand painted to the point that it was nearly covered with a language I wasn't familiar with. It looked vaguely Asian or middle-eastern. It was entirely alien to me aside from the upper left and right corners, which displayed very detailed paintings of the sun and moon. In the center of both the sun and moon were unnerving faces with blank 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 on his deathbed. He had requested that the boy's mother take this board from his store safe and 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 be done, but continuously referred to the board as 'that wooden devil.' When the boy's mother had 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 of ancient pirate 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 turning into a point of argument now that the 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. Realizing it was most likely not the best idea to get in the way of a group of kids' family issues when a hammer and a wooden slab are involved, I figured my best option was to break the thing myself to make sure the kids didn't get themselves hurt, then be on my way. This proved to be extremely difficult. I remember thinking that the board had to be reinforced with a steel plate or something. I was beating on the thing with the hammer for the hundredth time when I remembered that I had a hacksaw I had bought to remove a broken tree limb two years earlier, and had never touched it