The Lantern in the Leaf-Mold

On a grey November evening in 2014, I was cycling with a group of old university friends through the dense, dripping woods of the Ardennes in southern Belgium. We had driven down from Brussels for a weekend of camping and cycling, but the weather had turned, and our planned route along the ridge had morphed into a muddy, leaf-choked trail that wound deeper into the forest than any of us had intended. There were seven of us, but the group had fractured into smaller clusters as the terrain grew rougher. I was with my friend Simon, the two of us on mountain bikes, our lights casting weak, yellow cones through the darkening trees.

The forest was quiet in a way that felt unnatural. The usual rustle of squirrels or birdsong was absent, replaced only by the wet slurp of our tires and the occasional snap of a twig underfoot. We’d passed a rusted, moss-covered signpost an hour back, its arrows pointing to villages we never found. The trail forked into three paths, each narrower and more overgrown than the last. Without much discussion, our group split: three to the left, two to the right, and Simon and I took the middle path, which was so choked with brambles that it looked like a tunnel into the earth. Simon joked about nightmare fuel, but his laugh was forced.

We rode in silence for ten minutes, the path descending into a shallow, mist-filled hollow. The air grew colder, and my breath fogged in front of my face. My phone was dead—had been since the border crossing—and Simon’s was showing ‘No Service’ for the hundredth time, but he kept checking it anyway. ‘We should turn back,’ he said, but his voice was swallowed by the trees, and we pressed on, because the path seemed to want us to continue.

The first thing we noticed was the smell. A thick, sweet, cloying odor, like rotting flowers mixed with damp earth and something metallic. It came in waves, stronger and stronger, until we had to stop and pull our collars over our noses. Simon gagged. ‘What the hell is that?’ he managed to say, his eyes watering. I shook my head, not wanting to speak because it meant breathing in more of that stench.

We dismounted and pushed our bikes forward, the wheels sinking into the mud. The path had become a shallow trench with walls of dark soil and exposed roots. At the bottom of a steep decline, we saw a clearing, and in the center of that clearing stood a single figure—a man, broad-shouldered, wearing a long, dark coat that reached his knees. He was facing away from us, motionless, his head tilted slightly as if listening. But that wasn’t what made my blood run cold. It was the lantern he held in one hand, swinging gently, the flame inside glowing a sickly, unnatural green.

Simon grabbed my arm, his grip tight. ‘Is that…’ he whispered, but I put a finger to my lips. We didn’t move. The man didn’t move. For what felt like an eternity, we stood there, frozen, the lantern casting shimmering, green pools of light across the wet leaves. Then, slowly, the man began to turn his head toward us. Not his whole body—just his head, rotating on his neck like an owl, until his face was in profile. It was wrong. There was too much white in his eyes, and his mouth was open, but not in a scream—it was hanging slack, as if his jaw had become unhinged.

We ran. We dropped our bikes and ran, crashing through the undergrowth, branches whipping our faces, our hearts hammering. We ran until our lungs burned, until the woods began to thin, and we burst out onto a narrow, asphalt road. We looked back, but the forest was a wall of black, and the green light was gone. We were a mile down that road before we realized we’d lost the others. Our phones were useless, but we eventually flagged down a farmer who gave us a lift to the nearest village. The others were there, white-faced, huddled in a café. They’d seen something too, they said. Something with too many legs or too few arms. They wouldn’t talk about it further.

It was two days later, in the safety of a Brussels apartment, that I noticed the lantern. It was sitting on my dresser, glinting faintly in the morning light. I hadn’t brought it home. I hadn’t even touched it. But there it was, its glass smoke-stained, a wick burned low. And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the core, that it was waiting for me to light it again. That it would light itself, eventually, and that when it did, I’d be back in that clearing, and the man would finish turning his head to face me.