By the Light of His Lantern

by Abe Moss

  “You still don’t understand, I know. Even after I’ve explained it to you, it’ll take a while longer before you do. You’ll need to experience some of it yourself to really understand it.”

  “Explain it to me, then. What is this place? And why am I here?”

  “Young man, you’ve been cursed.” He looked upon Lewis with a slight smile, though his eyes remained cold and grave. “Someone, or quite possibly something, has placed you here for reasons only of their knowing.”

  “Cursed? What?”

  “Maybe you slighted the wrong person. Although, you look like a nice enough fellow, so maybe not. Never know. Maybe someone was jealous. I’ve heard tales of others being placed here for much less. You have any ex-lovers with ties to witchcraft?”

  Lewis, stiff as rigor mortis, could hardly process a single word coming from the old man’s mouth beyond the most bizarre and crucial to him: cursed.

  The old man shrugged. “Either way, you’re here now.”

  “Is this really happening?” Lewis said aloud, though he meant it for himself.

  “Yep, it’s really happening. Sure is, sure is.” The old man peered into his empty mug and a look of amusement showed in his eyes. He slid the mug across the table toward Lewis. “See, what did I tell you… a land of misery.”

  The mug wasn’t empty. It was in fact full, nearly to the brim. Dark and rich, the aroma caused Lewis’s hungry stomach to share its outrage with the room. There were so many other thoughts swarming his mind, however, that he couldn’t focus too closely on the mug or what it meant. That word—cursed—still captivated him.

  “You seem like a nice enough kid,” the old man said. “I really can’t think of why anyone should interest themselves in someone like you. Not by looking at you, anyway.” He thought a minute. “I mean, sure, I’ve only known you for a few minutes at most, but… hell, I’ve been wrong before. You hurt anybody? Murder anybody? You’re not… well, you know… one of those creeps who, eh…”

  A question struck Lewis then, bright and flashing in neon lights, and he uttered it the moment it entered his head.

  “How did you end up here?”

  The old man sat back, rubbed his cheek in thought, pulled the wrinkles smooth over his face as he did.

  “Nothing too interesting. Married the wrong woman. Well, she might have been the right woman… though she had the wrong connections. Really it was my fault… shouldn’t have slept with her sister. Turns out the lot of them, the whole family, were into the witchcraft, or whatever you might call it. Not their word, just mine. Made a mistake, and I’m paying for it dearly. For eternity, actually…”

  “Someone actually put a curse on me? Someone—wait, eternity? Is that what you said?”

  “Yep, yep. Eternity. At least I figure. I’ve been here awhile, met plenty others who’ve been here longer. This curse goes far back, apparently. It’s like a club, in a way. The “Oops, I’m fucked” club.”

  “How long have you been here for?”

  The old man took the mug back, stared into it again for a long time.

  “Well, there’s no real way to tell, to tell you the truth. Hard to say how many days or weeks or months or years it’s been without there even being a day to start from. I figure a long time, though. Hours, at least. Or maybe years. Just a few.”

  Lewis stood from the table and paced the room.

  “This can’t be real.”

  “It’s real all right.”

  “I have to be dreaming.”

  “Nope. No dream.”

  He bent over the table, hands on its surface, looked the old man square in the eye with hopelessness.

  “What happens now? What do I do?”

  The old man darkened. The sorrow on his face deepened his wrinkles until they were black trenches across his forehead and around his eyes.

  “I really hate to be the bearer of bad news.”

  “There has to be something.”

  “Well… I mean, it wouldn’t be such a great curse if there was just “something you could do”, you know…” He laughed nervously. “And, chances are, if you’re here… then… well, out there, in the world you’re used to… you’re likely dead.”

  “What? Dead?”

  “Dead.”

  “Then how…”

  “Your mind. Not just that, but… your consciousness, I’d call it. It’s trapped here. Whatever happens to your earthly body, well… that’s a mystery to us all.”

  Lewis sat dumbfounded, wrestling with the idea. Clearly he wasn’t dead, though. He was here! He existed at this very moment! He was talking to another living, breathing…

  “So you’ve never heard of anything? From all the people you’ve met here? You said that, didn’t you? That you’ve met others who’ve been here even longer than you?”

  “I’d say their being here longer is just an indication they’ve failed more than I in finding the answer you’re looking for. There are poor souls who have been here for lifetimes. With facts like that, what are the chances, do you think, of us still being alive outside this place, hmmm?”

  Lewis moaned and sank back onto the chair opposite the old man. He cradled his defeated head in his hands.

  “So young… so young…” The old man whispered.

  “You’re not helping,” Lewis said through his fingers. He leaned back in his chair and stared into the fire. “So what am I supposed to do now?”

  “The same as every other unfortunate soul who finds themselves in this land of misery.” The old man took up his mug of coffee and sipped long and slow. Then he set the mug back down and sighed, satisfied.

  “Be miserable.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Lewis expressed a desire to lie down for a while, and the old man offered his cot. So he sprawled out on it, covered his eyes with his arm, and thought very hard about his predicament. Mostly his mind just ran in circles, fed itself through the same loops of hopelessness and dread.

  He became so lost in these thoughts that he never noticed the old man die a second time. The front door to the cottage swung open and he jolted upright.

  “Oh,” he said, watching the naked, shriveled up man tip toe across the room toward the corpse facedown at the table. “It’s you.”

  The old man just gave a sheepish smile, stole back his ragged clothes, and heaved the body outside as he’d done before. When he returned, he shut the door and leaned against it with an exhausted sigh.

  “You’d think I’d learn better, but I tell you I never will.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have any extra clothes for me, would you?” Lewis asked.

  The old man sat at the table.

  “Afraid not. It’s hard to come by anything useful out here. Luckily, in the time I’ve been cursed, I’ve collected a fair few things to enjoy.”

  There was a wooden scraping sound as he dragged his mug back to himself over the table. He looked inside it and smiled. He lifted it to his lips. Feeling restless, frustrated, and above all terrified, Lewis jumped to his feet and rushed the old man. He took the mug from his weak hands. Its boiling-hot contents sloshed over the rim, over the back of his hand. He winced. He took the mug to the window and tossed the liquid out.

  “Hey!” the old man protested.

  “Why do you keep drinking this stuff if it only kills you?”

  “It can kill me as much as it likes, I’m not going anywhere.” The old man folded his arms. “I’ll take the momentary enjoyment I get from drinking it over the constant hunger in my belly. Yes, I’ll die, but it’s only a short walk back.”

  “So this is how you’ll spend the rest of eternity? You’ll just sit in here and poison yourself time and time again. Don’t you get bored?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Less now than I used to, I suppose, but yes. You see, after so long you begin losing the will to care anymore. I don’t know that I even know what boredom is, it’s been so long since I’ve felt genuine excitement. Although it did spark some healthy curiosity when I heard you
out there in the dark. It’s been some time since I’ve had any company…”

  “There must be more to this place,” Lewis said, and took a seat at the table again. “Where are all the others? The people you say you’ve met.”

  “Oh, here and there. They wander, most of them. Some of them settle someplace, as I have. And there are those who enjoy a sense of community, although because of the type of people who generally find themselves in a cursed place like this, those communities aren’t always the easiest to settle into. You might be surprised to know not many people here are as welcoming as I.”

  The old man took back his mug, which had already refilled itself.

  Not knowing what else to say, Lewis asked, “What happens if you destroy that mug?”

  The old man laughed. “I figure I’d find another like it in no time. It’s a vice of mine, you see. And the darkness knows that.”

  Lewis scooted his chair closer to the table. “What do you mean?”

  “The darkness out there, it’s not just an absence of light. It’s a living, breathing presence. It’s aware. I’ve felt it many a time, I know. It feeds on our misery. On our suffering. Each death is a tiny morsel, I think. Sustaining it. It grows deeper and darker still, though we can no longer perceive it. I imagine some time ago, perhaps at the curse’s conception, it wasn’t so dark before. But that’s just a feeling I have. Just a feeling. I don’t know where it comes from. I can just feel it.”

  “That mug of coffee,” Lewis said, eyeing it warily. “Where does it come from? How does it… do that?”

  “This? I just… found it one day! Or night. Some time. Out on the beach. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now—it was meant for me. A gift, of sorts. Only not a gift at all. I guess I’d gotten too comfortable here in my little shack, with my ever-burning wood to keep the rest of the darkness’s tools at bay. So—”

  “Ever-burning wood?”

  “Oh! Yes, that there.” He motioned to the flames seated in his rudimentary fireplace built of stones and sloppy slabs of rock. Lewis wondered how an old man such as himself managed to get some of those slabs in place to build it. Or had he built it? “That chunk of wood there, just the one…” It was only as he pointed it out that Lewis noticed. The flames, dancing and burning so consistently, enveloped a single log, which didn’t quite seem to be burning. Not a crackle or a pop. Not a single crisp of ash to be seen underneath. “Just don’t get it wet or smother it, and it’ll hold a flame as long as you like. Very handy in a place like this.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  The old man scratched his head. “Someone gave it to me. Seen ‘em before, but never one of my own. Did someone a favor and received it as a thanks.” The odd twinkle in his eye, the curling at the corner of his lips, caused Lewis some doubt. “Anyway, as I was saying. With my fire to protect me and keep me safe and warm, the darkness gave me something I couldn’t keep at bay. A vice. I stumbled over it in the sand, washed up from the waves. I didn’t think much of it, until one time I suddenly caught a whiff of this delicious smell. Coffee! Oh, how I’d missed it! I didn’t question how it came to be in the mug. There’s little else to be excited about here, you know, and after you’ve seen a thing or two you stop questioning what else the darkness might have in store. But then… well, it killed me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The darkness found its way to collect my dues, that’s all. And I’m fine with it this way, so long as I don’t have to worry about the rest of it. I’ll take a little poison over being eaten limb from limb out there in the woods like so many others. It took ages to get where I am here, with my little shack built next to my wash-up spot on the shore. Take it from me, you might consider doing the same near yours. Or, you know… you’re always welcome to keep me company here at mine, should you find yourself washed up again.”

  The old man burst into a fit of gravelly laughter.

  For a few minutes, Lewis only thought. He bore his concentrated eyes into the splintery wooden tabletop while the old man took sip after sip of his deadly drink.

  “You’ve been here a long time, then,” he said to the old man finally. “To have built this shack and everything. Are there others who have been here much longer?”

  “Oh, yes! God, yes! Much, much longer, yes. There are those who have been in the dark so long their minds have completely escaped them. If not for my fire, and my coffee, I fear it might happen to me some day. Still might. I don’t know.”

  “Do you think there are people who know more about this place than you do?”

  The old man scowled, shook his head disapprovingly.

  “I never claimed to know everything, did I? I suppose there are probably things I don’t know. I haven’t exactly devoted myself to studying our dilemma. I just know what I’ve seen. I’m sure there’s plenty more…”

  “Could you tell me where I might find someone who knows more?”

  The old man scoffed. He kept silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, it was more like a mutter. “What, you think you’ll be the first in all these eternities to find a way out… You think you’re the first to want a way out?” His voice rose. “You think I just sat down and gave up!? Is that it?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “The arrogance.” The old man gulped the rest of his coffee down. Lewis watched his Adam’s apple—hidden under the rough texture of his turkey neck—bob up and down as he drained it. He slammed the mug down. “You may have been young and full of ideas in the world you came from, but those mean nothing where you are now. Let me tell you. I’ve tried as hard as any other. I’ve hiked entire mountain ranges, I’ve climbed into the deepest bowels of this place. I built my own worthless boat with my own worthless, old hands, to try and sail away. There isn’t a way out. I didn’t give up. I accepted… I accepted the reality of it.”

  His sudden aggression caught Lewis off guard. “I was only… I was just asking…”

  “Just asking, my rear! You think I’m a dumb old man, I know. I couldn’t know much, could I? Discard me and move on, to whoever else will serve your purpose next. Glad to see the younger generations haven’t changed much since I croaked… Arrogant little prick…”

  “Well, I’m sorry if I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea of spending the rest of infinity sat next to a toothless old man one second and his stinking corpse the next!”

  The old man’s jaw dropped. He cocked his head back. Then his eyes narrowed. He leaned forward with a sinister weight on his brow.

  “Now when you say toothless… you mean I’ve got no teeth? Or no spine?”

  “The latter.”

  His narrowed eyes lit bright with fury. “I am not!”

  He sprang to his feet—legs wobbly with age or outrage, Lewis couldn’t tell—and threw the front door wide open.

  “You’re not welcome here anymore!” he shouted. “I demand you leave!”

  Lewis looked to the open door, the solid wall of black beyond it, and felt the blood run from his face.

  “I didn’t… I didn’t mean…”

  “I’ve got all the time in the world, but I don’t have time for brats like you,” the old man said through gritted teeth. “Get. Don’t make me fight you, because I will!”

  “Please,” Lewis said. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to know—”

  “I said get!”

  Lewis stood from the table, still naked as a newborn, and shuffled to the front door. He met the old man’s eyes on the way, and swore he saw steam rising from his flared nostrils like an old, sagging dragon. When his feet touched the cold sand outside, the door slammed behind him without hesitation.

  He looked over his shoulder as he left, at the fire-lit window, but the old man didn’t peer out after him.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  He sat in the sand not too far off from the old man’s shack. He didn’t want to venture too far from it. It was the only light he’d discovered, and to leave it behind felt like casting himself back into t
he ocean, not knowing what was out there or where the darkness would take him.

  He thought it over relentlessly, the talk they’d had. It hadn’t been much, but it was enough to start putting pieces together. He had some possible reasons for his predicament, if what the old man said was true. He didn’t much like thinking about those reasons, though. It was dark enough without them.

  He wished he hadn’t said or done whatever it was he’d said or done to turn the old man against him. Every now and then he looked back at the lit window and saw the silhouette had returned to peer out.

  Peer out at what? Lewis thought. Dumbass.

  He thought it all very strange—the story of the mug, the eternal starvation, the inability to satisfy it. It made him wonder why a place such as this was ever created, and how it was created, and who might’ve ever wanted to create it in the first place. Someone terrible, he thought. Someone evil. Sadistic. Bitter. It wasn’t just a land of misery. It was a land of spite.

  Fuck you, whoever did this to me, he thought.

  Soon enough he became tired of all the thinking and decided to pace the beach. He kept alert while he did. Sometimes he thought he heard noises behind the ocean waves, and he paused to listen. Always nothing. He told himself he shouldn’t be afraid of the dark, knowing it could always do its worst and he’d still keep coming back for more—albeit involuntarily. But he was afraid, even still. The dying wasn’t so much what scared him, but the pain of it. It lingered. His body was new and whole now, but he still felt the tiniest tingling in his flesh at the places he’d been bitten and torn. Or maybe he didn’t really feel it, but remembered it so vividly that he may as well have.

  He kicked the wet sand with his toes, looked over his shoulder at the shack. Most of it disappeared into the dark, but there was a faint orange haze hovering where he knew the window was located around the corner. And if he squinted hard enough he could make out fine lines of light coming through the planks it was built from.

  I need his fire.

  Wherever he went, he wouldn’t get far in the dark. There would be other things out there—things with teeth and claws and possibly worse, things he couldn’t imagine. The fire kept them at bay, the old man had said.