The Lantern Flies

The night air over the high desert of Nevada was dry and cold, the kind of chill that seeps into your bones if you stand still too long. My family and I had driven out to the Black Rock Playa for the Perseid meteor shower, away from the glow of Reno, to a place where the darkness was thick enough to taste. My name is Daniel, and I was with my wife Carla, our two kids, and a few friends from the university’s geology department. We had set up camp chairs and blankets, and for a few hours, the sky was a constant cascade of shooting stars, each one greeted with a chorus of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs.’ The kids, tired and full of hot chocolate, had finally fallen asleep in the tent. Carla and our friends followed soon after, leaving me alone by the dying embers of our small fire.

It was about three in the morning, and the fire had burned down to glowing coals. I decided to take one last look at the sky before turning in. I walked a few steps away from the camp, to a spot where the remnants of an old mining road cut through the playa. The only light came from the battery-powered lantern near the tent, which cast a faint yellow glow over the canvas, and the sliver of moon that had already set. The rest was a vast, starry blackness.

Something caught my eye. Flecks of light, like fireflies but bigger, bobbing low over the ground. They were about the size of golf balls, some translucent like frosted glass, others as solid and milky as pearl. They drifted in clusters, weaving between the sagebrush, casting no light on the ground, just glowing with a sickly internal luminescence. I thought maybe my eyes were playing tricks, or that I had some dust on my glasses. I took them off and wiped them on my shirt, but the orbs were still there, hovering about a hundred feet away.

A chill ran up my back, not from the cold. I remembered stories about the playa, how the ancient Paiute people warned of ‘walking lanterns’ that lured travelers into the desert, never to return. I had always dismissed it as folklore. But here they were, bobbing gently, almost lazily, as if they were waiting. I tried to rationalize: maybe some chemical reaction from the dry lake bed, maybe phosphorescent insects I hadn’t seen before. But they didn’t move like insects. They moved with a deliberate, almost sentient purpose, drifting closer.

I took a step back, and they stopped. ‘Okay,’ I whispered to myself, ‘that’s strange.’ I took another step, and they moved forward, closing the distance. I felt a cold dread that had nothing to do with the temperature. My heart began to race, and I thought about calling out to the others, but my voice caught in my throat. I was frozen, watching them.

One orb separated from the cluster and floated toward me. It was about the size of a softball, clear like a water droplet, with a faint shimmer inside, like a swirling pearl. It stopped about two feet from my face, hovering at eye level. I could feel a faint heat radiating from it, and a smell like ozone after a lightning strike. It pulsed, and suddenly I was aware of a low hum, a vibration in my bones.

The orb tilted, as if examining me. I saw, or thought I saw, a darker shape within the glow, a pinpoint of black, like a pupil. I had the distinct impression that it was not just looking at me, but into me, past my flesh, into something I didn’t even know I had. The hum grew louder, and the orb began to vibrate, and I felt a pulling sensation, as if it were trying to draw something out of me. I felt a sharp, stinging sensation behind my eyes, and instinctively I batted at it. My hand passed right through it, but the orb recoiled, darting back to join the others.

The cluster, now maybe a dozen orbs, began to pulsate in unison, like a coordinated heartbeat. They started to circle me, moving faster and faster, and the hum became a chorus of discordant tones. The air grew thick, and I felt a pressure on my ears. I wanted to run, but my legs felt heavy, as if I were in a dream. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they shot upward, straight into the sky, faster than any meteor I had seen that night, and vanished.

The silence that followed was deafening. I stood there, trembling, for what felt like an eternity. When I finally got my legs to move, I stumbled back to the tent, crawled into my sleeping bag, and lay there shaking until dawn. I didn’t tell anyone what I had seen.

But I couldn’t shake the memory. I became obsessed. I returned to the playa every weekend, alone, searching the ground for any trace of the orbs, any explanation. I sifted through the dust, but found nothing. I started talking to desert rats, old miners, and the Paiute elders I could track down on the reservation. Most brushed me off, but one old woman, her face like cracked leather, listened intently. When I finished, she said, ‘You have been marked. The lantern flies have taken a piece of your shadow. They will come back for the rest.’ I asked what that meant, but she just shook her head and went back to her work.

Nine months later, I noticed the change. It started with my reflection. I would catch my image in a store window or a bathroom mirror, and for a split second, my shadow seemed to be out of sync, lagging behind me. At first, I thought it was a trick of the light, or my imagination, but then I realized it was happening in broad daylight, even in well-lit rooms. I would be standing still, but my shadow would be twisted, sometimes leaning to the left, sometimes stretching beyond its normal bounds. My family started to notice, but I passed it off as a weird optical illusion, a personal quirk.

Then the dreams started. They were always the same: I was standing in the playa, surrounded by the orbs, but this time they were not glowing. They were dark, like holes in the world, and they were whispering to me. I couldn’t make out the words, but I felt a terrible cold, and a yearning, as if they were calling me home. I would wake up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding, my shadow on the bedroom wall looking much longer than it should have been, almost as if it were detached from me.

Last night, I couldn’t take it anymore. I drove out to the playa, alone, in the dead of night. I stepped out of the car, leaving the engine running, the headlights cutting two pale beams into the darkness. I walked to the spot where I had first seen them, and I waited. The wind picked up, whistling low, and then I saw them again, rising from the ground like a swarm of fireflies. They were there, exactly as before, but this time they were not bobbing. They were hovering in a straight line, forming a path that led deeper into the desert.

I knew what they wanted. I felt it in my gut. They wanted me to follow. And the worst part is, I felt a pull, a compulsion to do so. I took a step forward. Then another. As I walked, my shadow stretched out ahead of me, but it seemed to be moving on its own, trailing behind me like a separate entity. The orbs began to hum, and in that hum, I finally understood their words. They were not malevolent, not exactly. They were hungry, and they had been feeding on me, on my soul, my very essence, for the past year. And now they had come to collect the rest.

I looked back at my car, at the headlights, at the distant glow of human existence, and I felt a tear slide down my cheek. But I couldn’t stop. My legs moved of their own accord, carrying me with the swarm, deeper into the black, until the headlights were just a faint star, and then nothing. The last thing I remember is a warm, enveloping darkness, and a sensation of being swallowed whole, not by something outside, but by my own shadow, which had finally caught up to me and wrapped itself around me like a shroud. My phone was found a week later, half buried in the playa dust, its screen cracked and dead. The camera roll had a single photo: a blurry line of light, leading to a horizon of pure black. There was no trace of me. But sometimes, when the wind blows across the playa, the faint sound of a low hum can be heard, and if you look closely at the salt flats, you can see the shimmer of orbs, waiting for their next shadow.