By the Light of His Lantern

by Abe Moss

  “At least you’re not dead.”

  Her words, simple and honest, tore through his self-pity like fire through a droughted field, until all he had left was the bare shame underneath, scorched and naked for all to see. Though it was only him who saw it, felt it, throbbing in his chest.

  He turned around in an attempt to take it back but she was already gone.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  It was lonelier than he liked after the girl disappeared, as he waited and listened for her to return but she never did. He returned inside. He moved through the kitchen to the bottom of the stairs. The house was utterly silent. Did he call for her, for his mom? It was a difficult word to speak, not only because she wasn’t real, but because it had been so long since he’d spoken to the living, breathing version of her.

  “Are you up there?” he called.

  A brief pause.

  “I’m still here,” she answered.

  He climbed the stairs, followed the hallway to the bedroom doorway. She was still sitting on the bed, though the boxes were all put away. The bed, which had been streaked with blood the last he saw it, was clean.

  “You put everything away?”

  “Put what away?” she asked.

  He said nothing. She stood from the bed and took his hands in hers. She worked his fingers gently between her own.

  “You really aren’t her,” he said. He noticed he was smiling and stopped. He took his hands away. “My mom isn’t the touchy-feely type.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Lewis was taken aback. “And how should you know?”

  She scowled, hurt. Then she raised her brow, as though she remembered how he could be. “I haven’t seen you in a long time, is all.”

  Lewis decided to let it go. They could probably talk in these circles for eternity. He crossed the room, to the other side of the bed where he looked down on the blanket, now spotless.

  “There was blood on this,” he said.

  “Blood?”

  Lewis gave her a hard look, disbelieving. “From those boxes you pulled out. Don’t you remember?”

  She shook her head. Lewis dropped to his knees and peered beneath the bed and found the floor bare underneath, which was hard to believe in any house, real or not. He stood again, considered explaining it to her, sharing his confusion, and realized it would be no use. They weren’t operating on anyone’s logic here.

  Having had just about enough, he thought he’d get to the point.

  “None of this is real,” he said. “You’re not real, this house isn’t real. I’m trapped here, in this place…” He gestured in all directions. “…because supposedly I’ve been cursed. I was brought here, to this island, to you and this imaginary house, because there’s supposed to be a way out. Do you know anything about that?”

  His mother regarded him tiredly. “You always were so dramatic…”

  She left into the hallway. Lewis followed.

  “Dramatic?” He walked closely behind as she moved to the opposite end of the hallway, to the last door there. “It’s not dramatic, it’s what it is!”

  This final room was his parent’s bedroom—her bedroom. The light was already on. There was a long dresser under the bedroom window. It was there she wandered to, stood looking down at the things on top of it.

  “Don’t you know where you are?” Lewis asked. “You’re on an island, alone. Nothing else besides this house. You’re stranded here, with nowhere to go. Don’t you see that? This isn’t home. None of it’s real.”

  “This is real,” she said. She looked over her shoulder and their eyes met. Her face was softly lighted, full of calm. “Everything you describe is true, and it’s home, and it’s real. To me.”

  Lewis’s frustration reached its peak and he struggled to find words to better get his point across. Somehow she couldn’t understand, and that was all the more to convince him there was no use in trying. She was a mirage. The darkness conjured her, the idea of her, worked her like a puppet doing its best impression, but that’s all she was. Understanding wasn’t part of her act.

  There was a picture on the dresser, which she picked up. She looked it over somberly.

  “You don’t return my letters… I might as well be on an island, don’t you think?”

  “That’s not fair,” Lewis said.

  She set the picture down. From where Lewis stood he couldn’t see what it was, but he knew it well enough. He was sure if he took a step closer, he’d see an older version of himself there in the frame.

  “Don’t you know I care about you?” she asked.

  He focused his attention on the other side of the room, to the closet full of clothes and shoes. It didn’t take much looking to spot the men’s dress shirts separated from the rest of the clothes on their hangers. Old and long untouched.

  “I needed to get away.”

  “From what?”

  He gestured to the closet. “You keep him around, all his stuff, like he’s still here.”

  “What would you rather I did? Forget he existed?”

  “You don’t have to forget. Just move on.”

  “Running away isn’t moving on.”

  “I didn’t say I thought it was.”

  He couldn’t stand being in her bedroom any longer, couldn’t stand the conversation. He faced the doorway and she urged him not to go.

  “Just stay with me a while,” she said. “Talk to me.”

  “A lot of good it’s doing so far…” He leaned against the doorjamb, the head of the stairs at the opposite end of the hallway tempting but ultimately useless. She started to say something but he interrupted her. “The older I got, the more of him you saw in me, and it just… I couldn’t be that.”

  “Be what?” she asked, and startled him, having moved behind him while he spoke. She reached for him and he shrank away, stepped deeper into the room, leaving her by the door.

  “I could tell I reminded you of him, and I… I didn’t want to be this… this weird reminder. I barely remember dad, and I felt like I was supposed to live up to him for you, or like you expected me to stick around in his place forever. It was too much.”

  She was noiseless behind him. He was about to say something more, something superfluous to fill the silence, but decided against it. He had nothing to feel uncomfortable about, he thought. He spoke the truth. But as he waited, he couldn’t will himself to look at her again. No matter how many times he told himself she wasn’t real, the discomfort he felt in her presence grew by the minute. Finally, he turned around and she wasn’t there.

  He ventured halfway down the hall, creaking the floorboards, and peeked into the guest bedroom. Empty. He moved to the head of the stairs and listened. Nothing. He crept downstairs, into the kitchen, and found it empty as well. She had disappeared. Had she even heard anything he said, he wondered? Or maybe she had, and that was the problem.

  As he stood near the kitchen table, he felt a cool breeze against the backs of his legs. He spun around. It smelled of ocean mist. He followed it from the kitchen into the front room. The front door was open. There his mother was, standing in the sand a few feet from the bottom of the porch steps. Her hair moved in the breeze. Having expected something worse, a nightmarish trick courtesy of the darkness, he was relieved to find her.

  “You just walked away,” he said. “I thought—”

  “Do I make you that uncomfortable?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You think I want you to replace your father?”

  Part of him had always known it was irrational, but the suspicion existed regardless. His impression of her was that of someone very lost and desperate, someone who didn’t know what to do with themselves or how to help themselves without being told. He didn’t want to be responsible. He couldn’t be her pillar.

  “I think you’re lonely,” he said. “And you want me to be lonely with you.”

  She appeared as though she’d been struck. “You really think that?”

  “Every day
, you never missed a chance to remind me of how sad you were, how hopeless you were, as if you thought it was up to me to do something about it. That, or you wanted to keep me feeling sorry for you so I wouldn’t go.”

  “No, that was never… that’s never what I wanted.”

  “That’s how it felt.”

  She faced the breeze, the sound of the waves, even though there was nothing to see of it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I just… I needed to get away.”

  “You were all I had…”

  “I know!” he shouted. She flinched. Their eyes met and he wished he hadn’t raised his voice. “You don’t know what it’s like having that responsibility. I still had my own life to live, and I couldn’t shape it around you and your… your…”

  “My emptiness.”

  She looked down at her feet. Lewis wasn’t sure what to say. Now it was her, he thought, being dramatic. But was she wrong?

  “Even if that’s true,” he said, “it wasn’t on me to make you whole.”

  She nodded, head down. “I know.”

  “I mean… I have to do what’s best for me, too.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  Lewis fidgeted quietly, unsure what to say. His eyes moved over her back from head to toe. Her downturned face was partially obscured by her hair.

  Suddenly Lewis noticed the light around them changed. It had grown brighter. It crackled. He looked behind them, up the porch steps to the still-open front door, and his mouth formed an O of horror.

  “Oh my god,” he said. He pried his eyes away long enough to try for his mother’s attention. “Mom. Mom!”

  She didn’t respond. Meanwhile, the light that glowed over them grew hotter and brighter still. It shown in Lewis’s eyes like rubies.

  “You have to do what’s best for you…” his mother muttered next to him.

  “Mom,” he said again. “The house!”

  She turned around, head down. “I just missed you, was all. I had no idea I was asking so much.”

  She started up the porch steps. The front door was alive with flames. She was nearing the top when Lewis realized she wasn’t stopping, and he hurried after her, grabbed her by the arm.

  “Stop!” he said. “It’s on fire! Don’t you see?”

  She didn’t fight him. She didn’t look him in the eyes, either.

  “I’m not real,” she said. “Remember?”

  He didn’t notice it happening, but his hand wasn’t around her arm anymore and she was moving freely toward the fire. He started for her again, reached for her, and the flames singed his fingertips like molten barbs. She stepped through the doorway, her image a wavy mirage through the heat. Her clothes caught. Her hair caught. She smoldered through the living room, a column of fire, until she disappeared into the kitchen. Lewis approached the door again, curious of its heat despite his first touch, and of course the pain once more repelled him. He retreated down the porch steps into the sand and watched from a distance as each window filled with billowing destruction. The house moaned, its innards shriveling. Lewis was reminded again of Harvey and his burning home, his family inside, trapped. Only this time, those inside were inside willingly.

  She isn’t real.

  It was easier to think that, wasn’t it? But it wasn’t just easy, he thought, it was true.

  Right?

  In a single breath of smoke and ember, the roof to the house fell through, and the ceilings and floors collapsed beneath its weight. Lewis watched the guts fall apart from the inside out, shadows of wood and drywall and everything else raining past the open windows until they too began to sag.

  The heat reached new heights, so that Lewis distanced himself farther into the darkness, his back against a tree line. There he waited, watched, as the house’s exterior shown black in the flames, its skeleton.

  The rest burned slow.

  Lewis knelt in the sand while he watched. The flames were huge. They shook like branches in the wind, leaves of bright ash falling upward into the sky. Something else moved within them, a wandering shape. It paced from one side of the gutted house to the other, black and cloudy. A shell within a shell. Lewis squinted to see it, watched it circle what was left of the downstairs, until one instant his eyes lost track of it and couldn’t find it again.

  When the house burned itself dry and dead, and the flames reduced to twinkling hot pinpricks, he continued sitting in the sand, in the dark, not knowing what came next.

  If anything at all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It Comes to This

  We forgot the knife,” Lara said, squinting to read the image on her phone.

  “The knife?”

  “For the blood.”

  Catherine, already drooping where she sat, sank further with dread. She probed the long scab on top of her arm where she’d produced blood the first time. Still sore.

  “It’s not your blood,” Lara said. “We need his.”

  “What? His? I don’t remember reading that.”

  “Did you even read it?”

  “I read it!” Catherine said, and as she reached for the phone she tried to smother a cough rising from her chest. The cough won. She covered her mouth, and Lara, holding out her phone, waited long enough for the cough to subside that she set the phone on the ground instead for Catherine to read when she finished. Catherine cleared her throat, picked up the phone, and read the instructions over a second time. “Yes, his. But it says mine too.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you even read it?” Catherine said mockingly.

  When she offered the phone back, Lara regarded her morbidly.

  “You’re not getting any better. You sound worse.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sound like a frog. Or a really old smoker.”

  Catherine stifled another cough. “Thanks.”

  Lara read the instructions again silently.

  “So your blood goes on him. Like the first time, mixed with the powder. Then his blood goes on his belongings. Same symbol on both. Different symbol than the curse.”

  “In any order? Do we need to blow it in his face?”

  “Doesn’t say anything about blowing it in his face. It lists your blood going on him first, but I don’t know if it matters.”

  “We’ll just do like it says. What’s after that?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t even say what’s supposed to happen once we do all that. For all we know he’ll combust.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I know.”

  They sat on either side of him, looking at him like a puzzle with a missing piece. Catherine reached into the box of all his things and dug through it, through the folded letters that never ended. She pulled out his keys first, sat them on the ground. Next she found his father’s tie. She pulled the photograph out after that and handed it to Lara.

  “We’ll use that. I think that’s the best bet.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” Lara said. “I don’t understand how any of this amounts to anything…”

  Catherine, too weak to talk about it, nodded, blinked lazily. She took a deep breath and knelt over the young man’s sleeping face.

  “Go get the knife and let’s start this. Oh, and rubbing alcohol. In my bathroom under the sink…”

  Lara hurried upstairs. Catherine sifted through the letters in the box while she waited, glanced over words and phrases. Her head was heavy and cloudy. The nausea, which she thought had passed, was coming back. Her stomach cramped. It was milder than before, but steadily getting stronger. After a few minutes, she dropped the letters back in the box and called upstairs.

  “Lara!” Her throaty voice didn’t carry. She clambered to her feet and stood at the bottom of the basement stairs. “Lara?”

  Through the doorway at the top she saw Lara pass by, quick as a ghost. Curious, worried, Catherine climbed the stairs. When she reached the top, stepped into the front room, Lara entered from the kit
chen, knife and alcohol in hand.

  “What’s taking you?”

  Lara looked around, eyes drawn to the windows distractedly.

  “I quickly checked the house. Just making sure.”

  “Of what?”

  Lara shook her head. “Nothing, really. Just being paranoid, I think.”

  “Paranoid about what?”

  Lara shrugged, a feeble smile of reassurance. “Just a feeling I had. With all that’s happened, I think I’m a little jumpy. That’s all.”

  “Let me know if you see any moths,” Catherine said, almost joking.

  They started downstairs.

  Catherine took a seat, pocket knife in her lap. It was the same she used the first time. She’d washed it that night, though she planned on using the rubbing alcohol to cleanse it again. Even then, it wouldn’t be completely sterile. Close enough. If she got infected, she thought, it was just another trip to the doctor…

  Lara sat opposite Catherine, both on either side of the young man. She held the photograph.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you cutting him or am I? I don’t know if I can…”

  “I’ll do me first. Get it—” She coughed into her arm. Her chest ached. Taking a breath when she was finished was a chore on its own. “Get it over with.”

  Catherine took the powder out from her pocket. It was just a little cloth bag with twine around its neck. It was almost empty. Luckily she only needed a little, she thought, enough to mix with her blood and his. The page from the book didn’t specify an amount or anything like that.

  “Maybe the magic is in this,” she said to Lara, waving the powder. “The rest doesn’t have to make any sense. We don’t know what’s really in here…”

  “Yes we do,” Lara said, and held up her phone.

  Catherine shrugged. She unfolded the pocket knife. Its silver sheen was spotless. That was a good enough sign, in her eyes. She poured the alcohol over each side of the blade, let it spill and drip right there on the basement floor. It would dry up. Then she wiped the blade on her sweatpants, aware she was likely defeating the purpose by doing so. She laid her arm on her leg, flesh to spare. The knife in her hand shook uncontrollably. She wasn’t nervous, she thought. Or maybe she was. She was so exhausted she didn’t feel it either way.