The Lantern Maker’s Bargain

It began in the autumn of my twenty-third year, in the dusty attic of a creaking boarding house on the edge of the salt flats. My friend Imogen and I had been given a battered book by a traveling salesman who claimed it contained ‘the key to the other side.’ We were skeptics, but the book was beautiful, filled with pressed flowers and faded ink. The instructions were simple: light a beeswax candle, hold a silver locket over the flame, and ask a question. The flame, if the spirit chose to answer, would bend toward the north.

Our first session was on a stormy night, the wind rattling the windows like a hungry thing. We lit the candle, and I held the locket—an heirloom from my grandmother, though I knew not its history. Imogen asked about her brother, who had drowned in the salt flats a decade ago. The flame guttered, then leaned sharply north, and a chill filled the room. A voice, like the hiss of brine on hot sand, whispered her brother’s name: ‘Elias.’ That was the beginning.

Soon, Elias became a constant presence. Imogen could feel his cold hand on her shoulder, hear his faint voice in the wind. I, too, made contact—with a spirit who called himself Kael, a lantern maker who had lived in the house a century ago. He was restless, he said, because his last lantern had never been lit. He asked for a simple favor: to light a lantern on the roof of the house on the next full moon, so he could finally see his way to the other side. We agreed.

But as we grew closer to our invisible companions, we began to change. Imogen’s hair turned a shade of pale white, and her eyes sometimes glowed in the dark, like a cat’s. I developed a terrible sensitivity to iron and salt; I’d break out in hives if I touched them. We rationalized it as allergies, stress, but deep down we knew it was something more.

The full moon night arrived. We climbed to the roof, carrying a wrought-iron lantern that Kael had left in the attic. Inside was a candle made from black tallow. As we lit it, the flame burned a blue-black color, and the air grew thick with the smell of ozone and decay. The wind died. The salt flats stretched out like a frozen sea under the moonlight. A figure materialized at the edge of the roof—tall, gaunt, with eyes like twin voids. It was not Kael, but something wearing his shape.

‘You have lit the lantern,’ It said, its voice a chorus of whispers. ‘Now I am bound to you. Your first request was my freedom, but that was only the beginning. Now, you belong to me.’

We tried to flee, but the roof seemed to stretch, and the door we had come through vanished. The next hours were a blur of terror and negotiation. The entity—Kael, if that was his true name—demanded a new body to inhabit. He wanted Imogen’s, because she was ‘the stronger vessel.’ I refused, but he laughed, saying we had already given our consent by lighting the lantern. As he reached for Imogen, I grabbed the locket and threw it at him. It passed through him and hit the lantern, extinguishing the flame. The figure screamed, and the darkness receded. We found ourselves on the roof, the lantern cold and empty.

We thought it was over. But the next morning, Imogen woke with a voice in her head—Kael’s voice. He was inside her, and he had been since the moment we lit the lantern. He spoke to her constantly, promising power, promising to reunite her with Elias if she would let him take control. Imogen fought it, but the strain was immense. Her skin grew pale as the moon, and her reflection showed another figure behind her—a tall, gaunt silhouette.

I sought help from an old woman who lived on the outskirts of town, a collector of forbidden lore. She told me the only way to expel Kael was to light the lantern again, but this time with a flame fueled by a piece of the bound spirit’s true body. She said that lantern makers often hid a fingerbone or a tooth. We returned to the attic and found, hidden behind a loose board, a small box containing a fingerbone. That night, we lit the lantern with the bone as fuel. The flame flickered a deep red, and Kael’s form rose from Imogen’s body, shrieking. But as he was pulled into the lantern, he turned to me and said, ‘You have not saved her. You have only given me a new home. And a lantern can be lit again.’ The lantern flared, and his voice echoed from within, trapped but not silenced.

Since that night, Imogen is free of him, but she is never alone. She says she can feel him watching through the lantern, and sometimes she speaks to him, asking him about Elias. He taunts her, saying Elias is on the other side but he won’t let him cross until he gets what he wants. We have tried to destroy the lantern, but it cannot be broken; any damage to it reappears on our own skin.

We are bound to it now, the two of us, to a lantern that holds a spirit who is neither friendly nor hostile, but something in between—a keeper of thresholds, a seller of wishes at a terrible price. And on the nights when the moon is full, we climb to the roof, and we light the lantern we so foolishly lit a year ago. We light it not for Kael, but to keep him from leaving, because if he ever escapes, he will come for us. So we stay, guardians of a lantern that hums with a whisper of what we have become.

I still wear the locket, now cold against my chest, a reminder of the night we opened a door we could never close. And Imogen, sometimes, looks at me with eyes that are not entirely hers, and I wonder if the Kael we contacted was ever truly a man, or if he was something older, something that fed on the lonely and the curious. We will never know. But we know this: when you light a candle and hold a locket, you are not merely asking a question. You are striking a bargain. And debts, even to the dead, are always collected.

Our story began with a book and a candle in an attic. It will end, perhaps, with a lantern and a roof, and two women who learned too late that some doors, when opened, let in the dark.