The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

It was the late autumn of 2009, and I was the night manager at a small, rural gas station on the edge of the Blackwood Forest. The leaves had long since fallen, leaving the trees like skeletal fingers reaching for the sky. My shift ended at 2 AM, and the last two stragglers, a young couple who had been on a road trip, were waiting for a friend to pick them up. But the friend never came, and their calls went straight to voicemail. Grudgingly, I offered to give them a ride to the nearby town, but they insisted on driving themselves in their beat-up sedan. The girl, whose name I later learned was Emily, seemed eager to take the short cut through the old hollow road, which cut through the cemetery and the forest. I warned her that the road was unlit and prone to fog, but she shrugged it off.

As we reached the stop sign at the crossroads, the headlights caught the rusty sign pointing left to the hollow road and right to the main highway. There was something unsettling about the left turn, a darkness so profound it seemed to drink the light. Then I saw it: two glowing eyes, fixed on us from the shoulder of the road near the cemetery gate. They were not like any animal I knew; they were too low, close to the ground, and they glowed with a sickly amber light. I pointed them out to Emily and her boyfriend, but they dismissed it as a deer or a fox. The boyfriend, whose name was Marcus, said, ‘Let’s just take the quick way, I’m exhausted.’ Before I could protest, Emily turned left, and the headlights swept over the spot where I had seen the eyes. There was nothing there.

We drove slowly along the winding road, the cemetery wall looming on one side, the dense forest on the other. The fog began to curl in, reducing visibility to a few feet. I began to feel a pressure in my ears, like being underwater. Then, from the darkness ahead, we heard a wild, frantic barking. It was not a dog; it was something else, a sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Emily slammed on the brakes, and we skidded to a stop. The barking ceased abruptly, and a silence fell that was heavier than any noise. Then we heard a soft, rhythmic tapping on the roof of the car. ‘Don’t get out,’ I whispered, my hand on the door handle ready to lock it. But it was too late. The car engine died, and the headlights flickered out, leaving us in complete darkness.

I fumbled for my phone, but the screen was dead. The tapping on the roof grew faster, more insistent, and then it began to scrape, as if claws were dragging across the metal. Through the windshield, I saw a shape rise from the ditch ahead—a figure that was human in form but hunched and wrong, its limbs too long, its head cocked at an unnatural angle. In its hand, it held a small, flickering lantern, the glow casting eerie shadows that danced on the fog. It walked slowly toward us, and with each step, the cold seemed to seep into the car, frosting the windows from the inside. Emily let out a terrified whimper, and Marcus tried to restart the engine, but nothing happened.

The figure stopped a few feet from the car, and I could see its face—or the absence of one. Where its face should have been, there was a dark void, but from that void came a voice, low and gravelly, that seemed to vibrate in our bones: ‘The keeper of this road demands a toll. Your headlights dimmed, your engine died, but I can let you pass if one of you stays with me.’

We were frozen. Emily was crying, Marcus was shaking his head. I took a deep breath, an overwhelming sense of responsibility washing over me. These were my employees, or at least under my watch. I opened the door and stepped out into the freezing air. The figure tilted its head as if curious. I said, ‘I’ll stay. Let them go.’ The figure let out a sound that might have been a laugh, a dry rustling like leaves being crunched. ‘No,’ it said. ‘You are not the one. The one who chose the dark path must pay the toll.’ It pointed a long, gnarled finger at Emily. Emily’s scream was cut short as a black mist enveloped her, and she vanished from the driver’s seat. The engine suddenly roared to life, and the headlights blazed. Marcus and I were thrown back as the car sped forward on its own, down the road, through the gates of the cemetery, and out the other side, where we came to a screeching halt on the main highway.

I turned to look back, but the figure was gone, and the hollow road was just a dark, empty stretch. Emily was never found. The next day, I went to the gas station to file a report, but when I looked out the window, I saw the figure standing at the edge of the parking lot, holding its lantern. It nodded at me, and then it vanished. I quit my job the next day. I moved to the city, but even there, in the heart of the lights, I sometimes see the faint glow of a lantern in the periphery of my vision, and I hear a low, gravelly voice asking, ‘Who will pay the toll?’