The Lantern in the Library

The summer before my junior year, my cousin Maya turned seventeen, and my aunt threw her a lavish birthday weekend at our family’s lakeside cabin. The last night, after the fireworks and the bonfire, Maya, her friend Cole, my friend Janelle, and I decided to walk to the old boathouse we’d seen across the lake. It was a rusted, peeling structure that had been abandoned for years, but the moon was full and the water was glass, so we took a rowboat across. We beached it and crept up the creaking wooden steps. The door was jammed, but Cole forced it open.

Inside, the floor was littered with dried leaves and broken glass. The air smelled of mildew and old rope. We found a lantern hanging from a hook on the wall, and Cole lit it with a match he had. The light cast long, dancing shadows. We explored for a while, finding old fishing gear and a mildewed life preserver. Janelle and I sat on a dusty bench near the large, grimy window that faced the lake. She was telling me a story about her uncle’s ghost when she froze. Her face went pale, and she pointed toward the far wall, where a small, boarded-up window looked out onto the forest. ‘Someone’s there,’ she whispered. I squinted, and for a second, I thought I saw a figure—tall and motionless—standing just outside the window, its face pressed against the glass.

I shook my head, trying to convince myself it was a trick of the light. ‘Probably a deer,’ I said. But Janelle wouldn’t look away. We all fell silent, staring at that window. The lantern flickered, and then, as if the figure had moved away, the window was empty again. We decided to leave. But as we turned to go, I looked back at the window and saw that a faint, greenish light was glowing from inside the boathouse’s loft—a light that hadn’t been there before, and no one was up there.

That night, the four of us decided to sleep under the stars in the cabin’s screened-in porch, which was a treat we’d always enjoyed. We rolled out sleeping bags and set up a small lantern of our own. We played cards and told stories, trying to shake off the unease. Around midnight, Janelle and I were the only ones still awake. She had been taking photos with her camera, and I was scrolling through them on her phone. She scrolled past a shot of the boathouse from earlier, and I froze. In the background, behind the group, there was a white figure in the loft window—a thin, elongated shape that seemed to be reaching out. The photo we’d taken minutes ago showed nothing.

We looked at each other, terrified. Then suddenly, the lantern on the table next to us went out, despite there being no breeze. In the darkness, we heard a whisper from the direction of the lake—clear, as if right next to our ears: ‘You took the light.’ I fumbled for my flashlight and shone it around the porch. Nothing. But when I directed the beam toward the boathouse across the water, the light caught a pair of glowing eyes in the loft window, staring directly at us. And then, in a blink, the eyes vanished.

We were too scared to sleep, so we packed up everything and moved back into the cabin’s main house, locking every door and window. We didn’t tell the others what we’d seen, but we stayed up talking in hushed voices until dawn. At breakfast, Maya asked why we were so pale. Janelle finally broke down and told them. Maya laughed it off, but Cole looked worried. He said he’d seen something similar before, near his grandfather’s old barn—a presence that haunted the place, drawn to anyone who disturbed its resting spot. He said the only way to appease it was to return what was taken.

After breakfast, we went back to the boathouse in broad daylight. The place was just as we’d left it, but the lantern was gone. We searched everywhere, but it was as if it had never existed. On the dusty floor where the lantern had sat, we found a small, silver locket. I picked it up, and it opened to reveal a faded photograph of a young woman with the same eerie expression as the figure in the window. Inside the locket’s other half, there was a tiny rolled-up piece of paper. It read: ‘Do not feed the light.’ We left the locket on a shelf and ran back to the cabin.

That evening, as the sun set, we gathered on the porch to ‘reassure ourselves.’ But when we looked across the lake, the boathouse was lit from within—a pale, green glow flickering in the loft. And in the center of the lake, a figure stood on the water, facing us, slowly raising its arm to point at the cabin. We all screamed and rushed inside, but when we peeked through the curtains, the figure was gone. The next morning, I found the locket on the kitchen table, its chain coiled neatly as if placed there. I opened it, and the photograph was now blank. And the paper had been replaced with a single word: ‘Mine.’

We left the cabin that same day, and I haven’t been back since. But sometimes, at night, I swear I hear a faint knocking on my window, and when I force myself to look, there’s nothing there. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that something is waiting for me to return, to finish what I started when I first lit that lantern. And I know, deep down, that one day I will have to.