Lantern in the Pines
The rusted pickup across the road from the Grant house had become its own ecosystem when the windows got blown out. Dead leaves and mold, warped vinyl from snowmelt. Some say it was the Statler kid who popped the windows, the same one who brought the rifle to the Valley game and then bit that officer. Anything worth anything had long been scavenged from the cabin. All that remained of human passage were pulled beer tops on stained mats, a mouse-eaten Carhartt beanie, and the notebook, sticking out of the glove box like a rotting tongue.
When Tommy Grant was sent that summer to live with his aunt and uncle while the trouble got dealt with in Newport News, he didn’t think much of the notebook, about it being inside the glove one morning and on the shotgun seat the next.
People were always harassing the neighborhood, an unplanned tangle of hardscrabble dirt roads known unofficially as Grant’s Corner by its twelve residents, of which Tommy’s aunt and uncle were the youngest at sixty and sixty-three. Maybe it was the signal on his phone always being dead, or his aunt barking about the library shelving job that found Tommy Grant smoking in the pickup most mornings, and, on a particular morning in July, while the humidity hung in invisible sheets, opening the notebook and flipping through its jaundice-yellow pages.
The ink from the first entries had all bled away, but even he could tell it was mostly measurements and supplies—work notes. The other writing in the back hadn’t bled out. It was different, not blocky or mechanical. The words crinkled his eyebrows and made the sweat run faster between his shoulder blades.
You let a moth in. I’m not supposed to tell you these things. I’m not allowed. But you let a moth in, and we’re like that.
There was nothing else after that. He slapped the notebook shut.
Later, in the waiting room at the library, while the woman eyed him and his tattoos his uncle’s dress shirt didn’t quite cover, he thought about the words. Then at night, listening to the swoop-swoop-swoop of the ceiling fan, he couldn’t ignore the seed of curiosity germinating in his brain. Making sure the phone was charged enough to use the flashlight function, he slipped out of the house, padding across the dry road that hadn’t seen rain all summer.
He played the camera’s light over the seat. The notebook was gone. He strafed the beam through the cabin until it caught the peak of a spine resting on the dash. He crawled in and pulled the notebook to his chest. The light flickered. His hand trembled. There was more writing.
You don’t have to ask us, none of that Dracula crap. Dust motes, dead leaves, dried insect wings, surreptitious little particulars, scooted between the door and the mat. That hair, clinging to the back of your pant leg right now…
He knew he should stop reading. But that wouldn’t end it. It would be there in the back of his mind for days, maybe forever.
You could be on your game tonight, but you’re probably not. It’s a funny balance: the short while you’ve been glancing out the corner of your eye for the first sign of trouble, and the long while we’ve been here. You let a moth in.
On his way out the kitchen he’d thought to snatch the pen. Steadying his hand, he wrote the words.
What are you?
The next few nights he performed the ritual: waiting for the blue light of the TV in his aunt and uncle’s bedroom to go black; slipping out the kitchen door; making his way across the road, keeping out of the streetlight’s radius. But there were no new lines, no answer to his question, not until the end of the month when he spied through the broken windshield evidence of change.
The notebook, sitting upright on the dash.
He snatched it and turned his back to the road. There was his handwriting. And there was the answer.
I am a Lantern. I’ll show you. Tonight.
No dinner made its way into his belly that night: nothing would stay. The look his aunt and uncle gave him when he came out of the bathroom, wiping his lips with the backside of his hand, told him what they were thinking. The trouble down in Newport News wasn’t over.
The rain came that night like a cool salve on the land. He crept across the road into the shadow of the old church where the pickup sat, where no one had complained about it because it was poor church land. The figure by the wall was slender and black except for the face: paler than ivory, gleaming inside the shadow of the pine. He felt himself walk—no, float—towards it, towards the face of a girl with markings on her cheeks and a jagged gyve of lines like key teeth across her neck.
“You came alone?”
“Yes.”
The briefest indication of a smile.
“What are—”
“I told you what I am.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
Pale hands: reaching up, soundless through the darkness.
“I’m what’s keeping the others away.”
And with that, the fire spouted from the dark orbits of her eyes. Reaching up with black nails, she took the top part of the head in one hand, the chin in the other. As she twisted, light burst through the jagged markings across the neck, like a furnace door opening. His breath caught in his throat…He watched the pale hands unscrew the head and set it aloft as gently as a balloon. It rose higher and higher, impervious to the rain until it was well above the tree line.
Afterward, she told him of all the others she’d burned to keep the ignorant safe, for a Lantern is hope emblazoned, set aloft to trouble the night.
***
J.R. Potter is the author and illustrator of the critically-acclaimed teen mystery series Thomas Creeper about a mortician's son and apprentice turned detective for the dead. His graphic novel work has appeared in the pages of Image Comics and his short fiction has been published by The Portland Review and Owl Canyon Press. By day, he is equal parts music teacher, bartender, and dog lover. He is honored and delighted to be included with fellow lovers of the macabre in Grim & Gilded.