The Lantern Bloom

It started on a Tuesday, three months into my stay at the converted sawmill on the edge of the marsh. The place was a rental, cheap because the landlord warned me about the damp and the way the floorboards sighed at night. I didn’t believe in ghosts, not really. I was a practical man, a cartographer who liked his maps straight and his boundaries clear. The marsh was just a soggy green smudge on my survey charts, and the sawmill was just a roof over my head.

That night, I’d been working late, tracing the feeder streams that bled into the main channel. My desk lamp cast a weak yellow cone, and the rest of the room was a cavern of amber shadows. I finally pushed back from the table, rubbed my eyes, and shuffled to my cot in the corner. I pulled the quilt up to my chin, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like a drowned hand. The air was thick with the smell of wet wood and rotting reeds. I closed my eyes, and just as I was sinking into that heavy gray space between waking and sleeping, the room turned blue.

It was like a flashbulb going off, but cold, and it came from the center of the room, near the old iron pulley that hung from a beam. For a second, I was blind, my eyes burning with the afterimage. When I blinked it away, there was a light there, a small, pulsing orb the color of a gas flame on a stove. It was transparent, and inside it, I could see faint swirls, like smoke caught in a jar. It hovered, motionless, and the room felt suddenly still, the usual creaks and groans of the mill gone silent. I thought I might be dreaming, but I was too awake, my heart hammering against my ribs.

The orb drifted, slow and lazy, toward the foot of my cot. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe. It stopped a foot from my feet, and then it began to change. It stretched, elongated, and the light dimmed until it was a soft, milky glow. A figure coalesced inside it, a shape that was both there and not there, like a reflection in a murky pond. It was tall, draped in a robe that seemed to be made of the same pale light as the orb, and its face was a void, a hollow where features should have been. The hood was deep, and inside it, I caught a flicker, like a candle guttering in a draft.

It just stood there, staring at me. I mean, I felt its gaze, even without eyes. It was heavy, curious, like a child examining a bug. I wanted to turn over, to bury my face in the pillow and pretend it wasn’t there, but something held me. That primal human curiosity, the same thing that makes us look over a cliff’s edge. I lay frozen, my eyes locked on the figure, and the seconds stretched into minutes. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the light dimmed, the figure collapsed back into a orb, and the orb popped like a bubble. The room was dark again, and the normal night sounds returned, the lap of water, the distant cry of a heron. I didn’t sleep that night.

The next night, I tried to stay awake. I brewed coffee, kept every light in the mill blazing. I told myself it was a trick of the mind, a bit of swamp gas or a passing car’s headlights. But at 11:43, the same time as before, the blue flash came again. This time, I was sitting in my chair, watching. The orb appeared, hovering in the same spot. It didn’t drift toward me this time. It just floated there, and I swear, it was looking at me. Waiting. I stared back, and after a few minutes, it vanished.

Night after night, it came. Sometimes it would manifest closer, sometimes it would just appear and watch from across the room. I started to keep a log, a cartographer’s habit. I recorded the time, the duration, the position. The third week, I noticed something odd. The orb wasn’t just appearing; it was growing. Each night, it was slightly larger, and the light inside it was more intense, and I began to see shapes within, not just smoke, but suggestions of things, like distant spires and strange, twisted trees. I also noticed that the marsh outside the window, which I could see by the light of the orb, seemed to change. The usual reeds and cattails were replaced by silhouettes of something else, a landscape that didn’t match my maps.

The fourth week, I made a mistake. I tried to touch it. It was hovering near my worktable, and I had a sudden, irrational urge to reach out. My hand passed through it, and the cold was unlike anything I’d felt, a bitter, gnawing cold that traveled up my arm and settled in my chest. I reeled back, gasping, and the orb flickered, and for the first time, the figure appeared not at the foot of my bed, but right in front of me, its hooded face inches from mine. I saw inside that dark hood, and for a split second, I saw not an empty void, but a landscape, a dead and gray world under a sickly sun, and a figure standing on a hill, waving. At me.

I ran. I grabbed my keys and drove to the nearest town, a place called Cedar Falls, and checked into a motel. I told myself I was done. I stayed there for a week, sleeping with the lights on, avoiding any mention of the sawmill. But the dreams came, always the same. I was standing in the marsh, and the orb was floating above the water, and the figure was beckoning. And in the dream, I always went closer, my feet sinking into the muck, until I was close enough to see that the figure wasn’t a ghost, but a person, a woman with skin like old parchment, her eyes closed, and she was holding a lantern that bloomed with that same blue light. She was trying to tell me something, her mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear the words, only a sound like reeds scraping together.

I went back, of course. I couldn’t stay away. The pull was too strong. And now, it’s three months later. The orb appears every night, and it’s no longer an orb. It’s a full-sized figure, and it doesn’t vanish. It stands at the foot of my cot, and I’ve grown accustomed to it, like a lodger. I’ve even started talking to it, telling it about my day, about the maps I’m drawing. It just listens. But last night, something changed. I was lying in the dark, and the figure wasn’t at the foot of my bed. It was above me, hovering, and it reached out, and it had a hand, a hand of pale light, and it placed it on my forehead. The cold was unbearable, but I couldn’t move. And in that moment, I understood. The figure wasn’t a ghost. It was a traveler, from a world that exists alongside ours, and it had been trying to cross over for decades. My sawmill was built on a thin spot, a place where the veil was worn transparent. And it had chosen me, not as a victim, but as a guide. It needed me to map the way.

I’ve started a new map, now. It’s not of the marsh. It’s of the other side, the gray world I glimpsed in the hood. I’m drawing it from the memories the figure gives me, in flashes, in dreams. The land is dead, but there are ruins, and the light is always blue. And in the center of it all, there’s a lantern, waiting to be lit. The figure is growing stronger, more solid. It’s almost here. And I know, I know that when it fully arrives, I will have to go with it. I will become the lantern, and my light will guide others through that thin space. As I write this, the orb is hovering by my window, and it’s looking at the map I’ve drawn. And it’s smiling. Or at least, I think it is. The night is cold, and the blue light is getting brighter, and I realize now, this was never a haunting. It was a job interview. And I got the position.