The Lantern in the Saltmarsh

I’ve always been a little too attuned to the world beyond the veil. It’s a gift, my grandmother called it, but it always felt more like a curse. This particular story is from when I was nineteen, studying at a small coastal university in Oregon. I met a man—Callum—from the Shetland Isles, a place of constant wind and old, stubborn mysteries. He was magnetic, with a brooding intensity that I mistook for depth. Within three months, the enchantment curdled into something dark and possessive. His temper was a storm, and I was the small boat caught in it. After each explosion, he’d apologize, weeping, saying his love for me was so vast it broke him. I believed him, because I needed to.

We moved out of the dorms into a rundown cottage on the edge of a saltmarsh, miles from anyone. The house was called the Oystercatcher’s Rest, though no oyster catcher had been seen there in years. The shingles were warped, the windows rattled with every gust, and the marsh stretched out like a grey-green sea, dotted with pools that reflected a sky that never seemed to fully lighten. It was there that the fabric of normalcy began to fray. Callum would wake in the middle of the night, insisting that someone was stroking his hair, though the room was empty. A fine, cold breeze would move through the strands, and I could see the indentations of fingers in the dark. Our cat, a ginger tabby named Wren, would hiss at empty corners, her fur rising, her eyes following something we couldn’t see. A pervasive dread settled into the cottage’s walls, as if the marsh’s mud itself had seeped into the plaster.

I started noticing the lantern. It hung by the back door, an old brass thing with a cracked green glass. I’d never filled it with oil, never touched it, but at night, from my bedroom window, I could see a faint, flickering glow from it—as if someone had lit it and was standing beside it. The glow would pulse in a strange rhythm, like a heart beating. One night, consumed by a sleep-deprived courage, I crept downstairs. The lantern was cold to the touch, no fuel, no wick, but the glass was warm, and the smell of salt and rotting seaweed hung around it. As I stood there, I heard a soft, wet sound from the marsh, like footsteps in mud, coming closer. I pressed my face to the window, but saw only the mist and the pale, slick surface of the tide pools. Then, the lantern flared, a burst of light that threw my own reflection back at me—but it was wrong. For a split second, I saw myself crying, my face bruised, and behind me, a tall figure with a lamp, not Callum, but something else, something with hollow eyes.

I tried to tell Callum, but he dismissed it, told me I was hallucinating from stress. Yet, that very night, he woke screaming from a nightmare, drenched in sweat. He said he dreamed of the marsh swallowing him, pulling him down by the ankles, while a figure with a lantern watched from the shore. He started spending more time at the local pub, coming back late, reeking of whisky and fear. I’d find him muttering to himself, tracing patterns in the dust. The abuse escalated—not just his temper, but a kind of paranoid desperation. He’d accuse me of plotting against him, of trying to attract the ‘thing’ in the marsh. I became a prisoner in that cottage, too terrified to leave, too broken to fight.

One evening, he didn’t come home. A violent storm rolled in, turning the sky a bruised purple. I waited by the window, watching the lightning crack above the marsh. I saw the lantern again, now brighter, almost blinding. And I saw a figure walking toward the house from the marsh—but it wasn’t Callum. It was tall, gaunt, with long hair plastered to its skull, and it carried a lantern that did not flicker. It stopped right outside the back door, raising a hand to the window. In that hand, I saw it wasn’t flesh, but bone, and the lantern’s light showed me something that made me gasp: the figure’s face was my own, but older, more hollow, with eyes that were nothing but black pits. It grinned, and the grin split its face from ear to ear, like a wound. Then it was gone.

The next morning, the police found Callum’s body in the marsh, half-submerged, his limbs twisted like driftwood. They ruled it as an accident, a case of exposure. But as they carried him away, I noticed the brass lantern was gone from the door. And for weeks after, I could hear it at night—a distant clanking, a soft slosh of water, and a voice that hissed my name in a language I’d never heard. I left Oregon, fled to my mother’s house inland, but I still dream of the saltmarsh, of the tide rising, and of the figure with my face, waiting for me to come back. I know that lamp is still burning, and that someday, it will call me home. Until then, I never look out a window after dark without checking the glass for my own reflection, afraid of who I’ll see standing next to me.