The Lantern in the Garden

In the autumn of my second year at the National Institute of Technology in Rourkela, I found myself bound to three companions: Mira, Arjun, and Ravi. We were inseparable, spending long evenings in the hostel courtyard, sharing smuggled cups of chai, and dreaming of futures that seemed both imminent and impossibly distant. But as fate would have it, our quartet was to be broken when Ravi’s father received a transfer to Jamshedpur, a city some 350 kilometers away. The parting was somber, and we promised to keep in touch as faithfully as the postal service would allow.

Initially, our letters flew back and forth—Ravi’s neat handwriting detailing his new life, his new room, and the peculiarities of his new city. But as the weeks turned into months, the letters grew sparse, then halting, then stopped altogether. Mira, Arjun, and I, caught in the whirl of our own final-year projects, let the silence stretch until it became a chasm we were too busy to cross. It was only when Mira revealed that she had not heard from Ravi in over two months that a chill of unease settled over us.

We decided to visit him. The journey by train was long, and we arrived at the Jamshedpur station as dusk was deepening into night. Ravi’s address was a modest bungalow on the outskirts of the city, a quiet lane lined with gulmohar trees. The house itself was shrouded in shadows, its garden overgrown, and a single gas lamp flickered on the porch, casting trembling light across the peeling paint. We knocked, but no one answered. The door was slightly ajar, so we pushed it open and stepped inside.

The interior was cluttered with furniture draped in white sheets, as if the occupants had left in haste. A fine layer of dust covered every surface. We called out Ravi’s name, our voices swallowed by the oppressive silence. In the living room, we found a stack of our letters, unopened, placed neatly on the mantelpiece. It was then that Arjun noticed a door at the back of the house that led to the garden.

The garden was a maze of overgrown hedges and tangled vines. In the center stood a rusted iron lantern, its glass panels cracked but intact, and inside it, a candle stub. Mira, ever curious, struck a match and lit the candle. The flame sputtered, then steadied, casting a soft glow that seemed to push back the encroaching darkness. As we stood there, something moved at the edge of the light—a shape, vaguely human, but wrong. It was tall and gaunt, with arms that hung too long, and when it turned, we saw that it had no face, only a smooth, featureless expanse where features should have been.

We ran. The lantern seemed to follow us, or so it felt, for every time we looked back, we saw its glow bobbing among the shadows, growing closer. We burst back into the house, slamming the door behind us. But the light seeped through the keyhole, through the gaps in the rotting window frames. We retreated to the bedroom, barricading ourselves with a chest of drawers. The light slid under the door, pooling on the floor, and from the pool rose a whisper, dry as autumn leaves: ‘Why did you light it?’

The whisper came from everywhere and nowhere, and it was Ravi’s voice. We answered desperately, asking where he was, and the whisper replied, ‘I am in the lantern now. You let it free when you lit the candle. It feeds on the light, and I am its food. But you can put it out.’

We looked at each other, our faces pale in the eerie glow. The door began to rattle as if something heavy pressed against it. Without a word, Mira reached into her bag and pulled out a small hand mirror. She had always carried it for good luck. ‘The lantern’s light,’ she said, ‘we need to reflect it back into itself.’

We crept to the door, and Mira held the mirror. As the door burst open, the light surged in, and she angled the mirror to catch it. The beam bounced back, striking the lantern’s cracked glass, which now stood on the threshold, hovering as if held by an invisible hand. The reflection split the light, and the lantern seemed to shudder. With a high-pitched crack, the glass shattered, and the candle’s flame guttered and died.

Silence fell. The garden was dark now, and the shape was gone. We found Ravi huddled behind a bush, thin and trembling, his eyes wide with terror. He told us that he had found the lantern in the garden a week after moving in, and, thinking it a curious antique, he had lit it to see if it worked. Since then, the creature—the thing that lived in the lantern—had tormented him, promising to consume his soul if he ever let the light go out. He had been too frightened to write, for fear of drawing us into its trap.

We took Ravi with us and left that house, never to return. He never spoke of the lantern again, and we never asked. But sometimes, when a candle flickers in a draft, I see him go rigid, and I know that the memory of that faceless thing, and the whisper that was his own voice, will never truly leave us.