The Lantern in the Crawlspace

I was maybe six when I first saw the thing under the house. We lived in a rusted farmhouse on the edge of a dead cornfield in eastern Nebraska, where the wind never stopped and the sky went gray by four in the afternoon. My brother and I shared a room at the top of the stairs, with a window that faced the field. Our beds were pushed into an L shape, mine against the wall, his jutting out toward the door. I always slept with my back to the wall, staring at the crack under the door, because that was where the dark seemed to breathe.

One night, after the house had settled into its usual creaks and groans, I woke to a different sound—a scrape, like something heavy being dragged across the floor below. Then the door to our room eased open, just a sliver, and I saw them: shapes, not quite solid, moving through the dark. They were tall, but hunched, and they came through the gap like smoke, spreading out across the floor. They didn’t walk so much as drift, their edges blurring into the shadows. I wanted to yell for my mom, but my throat closed up, and all I could do was watch as they started toward my bed. One of them had a lantern—an old, rusted thing with a glass pane, and the flame inside was a sickly blue. It swung as it moved, casting long, wrong shadows on the walls.

I squeezed my eyes shut, the way you do when you’re a kid and you think if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. I counted to ten, then twenty, and when I finally opened my eyes, the lantern was right there, hovering over me. But it wasn’t the shadow figures holding it anymore. It was a girl. She was standing on my brother’s bed, leaning over me, her face inches from mine, and she was smiling. Her hair was black and wet, like she’d just come up from a river, and the light from the lantern made her skin look like old paper. She didn’t blink. She just held the lantern up to my face, and I could feel the heat of it, but it wasn’t warm—it was cold, like a draft from a cellar. I closed my eyes again, and when I opened them, she was gone, but the shadow figures were still there, closer now, ringed around my bed. The one with the lantern—or maybe it was the same one, somehow—was reaching for my hand.

I don’t remember screaming, but I must have, because my mom came running in. The figures vanished the instant the hall light flicked on, but the lantern stayed, sitting on the floor by my bed, its blue flame guttering. My mom saw it too, and she went pale. She grabbed it with a towel and threw it out the window, into the cornfield. She told me it was a dream, that I was just scared, but I saw her face. She knew better. The next morning, my dad went out to find the lantern, but it was gone, and there were footprints in the mud—bare feet, but too small, like a child’s, leading from the field to the crawlspace under the house.

We never talked about it again, but I never slept with the door closed after that. And sometimes, late at night, I’d hear a scrape from under the floorboards, and I’d see a faint blue light seeping up through the cracks. I moved out as soon as I could, but that lantern followed me. Not physically, but in my head. Every time I close my eyes in the dark, I see that girl’s smile, and I feel that cold heat on my face. And I know, deep down, that she’s still waiting under that house, holding that lantern, smiling, because she knows I’ll come back. They always come back, don’t they? The ones who’ve seen what’s underneath.