The Carbide Lantern

Old Man Hollis never talked about the night his engine died on the Mountain Loop Road. He’d spit tobacco and change the subject if you brought it up, his gnarled fingers tightening around his coffee mug like he was squeezing the life out of a memory. But I got it out of him one summer evening, sitting on his porch, the fireflies beginning their Morse code in the yard. He told me that when he was a young buck, he and his cousin Earl were out hunting raccoons somewhere back in the hills, using a carbide lantern that cast a hissing, white light. “That lantern was our lifeline,” he said, “and that night, it was the only thing between us and something that didn’t want to be seen.”

They were driving his old Ford pickup, a rusty bucket of bolts that had no business being on those dirt roads. The engine coughed and died about halfway up a particularly treacherous stretch, where the trees closed in overhead like a cathedral of darkness. “No moon, no stars,” Hollis said, “just the black, and the sound of my own breathing.” Earl handed him the lantern while he popped the hood, trying to coax the truck back to life. The lantern was flickering, low on carbide, and Hollis was cussing a blue streak, calling the truck every name in the book.

Earl, who was never the brave one, grabbed Hollis’s arm and whispered, “Hollis, there’s something coming up the road.” Hollis was in no mood for games. “Shut up and hold the light still,” he growled, wrenching at a bolt. But Earl was shaking. “No, I mean it. Look.” Hollis finally turned, and there, at the edge of the lantern’s dying glow, two eyes reflected back at him. They weren’t animal eyes—no, animals had a certain wildness to them. These were flat, yellow, and they hovered about six feet off the ground, and they were coming closer, slow and deliberate.

“I dropped the wrench,” Hollis said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Earl was already in the truck, slamming the door. But I couldn’t move. Those eyes just kept coming, and the lantern sputtered, and I saw—just for a second—a shape that was too thin, too tall, with arms that hung too low.” He finally broke out of his trance, scrambled into the truck, and locked the doors. The eyes circled the truck, round and round, for what felt like hours. The lantern on the ground finally died, and the darkness was absolute, but they could still see those yellow eyes, drifting past the windshield, past the rear window, never blinking, never stopping.

“We sat there till dawn,” Hollis said. “Didn’t talk, didn’t sleep. Just watched those eyes until they faded with the first light of morning.” When the sun came up, the truck started right up, like nothing had ever been wrong. They drove home without a word. Earl sold his coonhounds and moved to the city. Hollis never went hunting again. He became a deacon at the church, and he never told this story to anyone except me, and only because I promised I’d never repeat it while he was alive.

He looked at me with those old, tired eyes. “You know why it was circling?” he asked. I shook my head. “It was waiting for one of us to get out. It wanted the lantern to go out, so we’d be in the dark.” He paused, rubbing his thumb over a scar on his hand. “And you know what the scariest part is? It didn’t seem angry. It seemed patient. Like it knew it had all the time in the world.” And then he said, “I still dream about those eyes. And in the dreams, I’m the one on the outside, looking in.”