The Flickering Lantern

The night the storm swallowed our power, I was nine, not ten, and the house on Bitterroot Lane felt like a ship lost at sea. My brother Finn and I huddled by the window, watching the rain lash against the glass like angry fingers. When the lights died, the darkness was so complete it felt solid, pressing against our eyes. Mom fumbled for candles, but Dad called us into the living room, his voice tight with a strange excitement. He held an old camping lantern, the kind you twist to ignite, and said, ‘Everly, this thing just flickered on by itself. The knob is off.’ I thought he’d left it on or the spring was worn, but then the bulb pulsed—a weak, sickly glow that grew until it burned like a tiny sun, casting long, dancing shadows that didn’t match our movements. The light seemed to have a heartbeat, a rhythm that made my teeth ache.

Dad had always been a collector of old things, and his shelf was lined with dusty tomes about spirits and séances. He believed in the other world, and after that night, he was convinced the lantern was a gateway. A week later, a package arrived with a set of antique tools: a brass compass that spun without direction, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a pair of night-vision goggles that made everything look like a green-tinted graveyard. He set up a ‘listening post’ in the attic, stringing wires and placing the recorder near the lantern. He asked Finn and me to join him, promising we’d ‘make contact.’ I was scared, but the mystery pulled at me like a hook.

The first session, we sat in the dark, the lantern off but humming with a faint electricity. Dad pressed record and asked, ‘If anyone is here, make the light shine.’ Nothing happened for minutes. The wind outside groaned. Then the lantern clicked on, and the room filled with a cold that sank into our bones. The recorder’s spools turned slowly, and Dad played it back. Beneath the hiss, there was a voice—thin, like a child’s—whispering, ‘Don’t trust the light.’ I wanted to leave, but Dad’s eyes were wide with wonder. He didn’t notice that the voice had come from the recorder itself, not from the room.

The next night, I had a nightmare where I was drowning in a sea of darkness, and the lantern was a lighthouse on a distant shore, but its beam was the color of old blood. I woke to find the lantern glowing in my bedroom doorway, though the door had been closed. I screamed, and Dad came running. He just smiled, saying the spirit was ‘attached’ to the light. He started carrying the lantern everywhere, even to dinner, where its glow made our faces look hollow. Finn refused to sit near it, and Mom grew pale, but Dad wouldn’t listen. He claimed the spirit was a little girl named Elsie who had died in the house years ago, and he spent nights talking to the lantern, asking it questions. The compass started spinning whenever he mentioned her name.

One evening, Dad took us to the backyard, where a rusted well stood half-covered with rotting boards. He said the spirit’s family had thrown a locket down there, and if we could find it, the spirit would be at peace. He lowered a camera on a rope, and we watched the grainy feed. The flashlight on the camera flickered, and we saw a small hand reach from the dark water, clutching a silver locket. Dad cheered, but the hand belonged to a creature with too many joints, and its face was a blur of shadows. The locket fell back, and the screen went to static. That night, the lantern burned so bright it started to smoke, and I heard a low, rhythmic drumming from inside the house. It was the sound of a heartbeat, slow and steady, but it wasn’t ours.

The next day, Dad was different. He wouldn’t let us leave the house. He took to muttering in a language I didn’t understand, and he’d stare at the lantern for hours, his eyes reflecting its glow like a cat’s. Finn tried to smash the lantern, but Dad caught him, his grip like iron. He hissed, ‘She needs us, you understand? She needs the light to grow.’ He locked us in the cellar, where the only light came from a small grate above. The lantern sat in the center of the floor, unlit, but I could feel it pulsing in the dark.

On the third day, a storm rolled in again, and the cellar flooded. The water rose to our ankles, then our knees. The lantern began to glow on its own, stronger than ever, and the water started to shine with a sickly green light. From the grate, we heard chanting—Dad’s voice, but doubled, as if echoing with another. The water swirled, and a shape formed—a tall figure with elongated limbs, its face a smear of gray. It pointed a long finger at me, and its mouth opened wide, wider than a human’s, to release a stream of lantern light. The light swallowed the cellar, and I felt myself being pulled into its core. I grabbed Finn’s hand, and the last thing I saw was the lantern, now a small sun, with thousands of eyes opening on its surface.

We woke up on the lawn, the house behind us a burnt shell, smoke curling into the night sky. The lantern was gone, but a single beam of light, like a searchlight, scanned the treeline. It turned toward us, and we ran. We never looked back. But sometimes, when there’s a power outage, I see a faint glow at the edge of my vision, and I hear a whisper from the dark: ‘Don’t trust the light.’ The light never dies; it just changes shape.