The Lantern Man

I was three when we moved into the old quarantine cottages on the northern edge of the pine forest. My mother and stepfather had taken jobs at the sanatorium up the hill, a sprawling red-brick complex that had once housed consumptives and now sheltered the aged and infirm. Our cottage was number nine, the last in a row of identical timber homes with corrugated iron roofs and wide verandas. It smelled of creosote and dried lavender, and the floorboards creaked even when no one walked on them.

Every night, I woke at the same hour—the clock on the mantel read 3:33 AM, though I couldn’t yet tell time. I’d crawl out of bed, take my small torch from the nightstand, and shuffle to the window. The beam would sweep across the yard, past the clothesline, the rusted water pump, and the thicket of ferns that bordered the forest. The truth is, I didn’t remember any of this. But my mother told me the story so many times that it became my own, a story I could picture as clearly as if I’d seen it yesterday.

In her telling, I’d point the torch at the edge of the trees and call out, ‘Mum, Dad, there’s an old man out there.’ They’d rush in, their faces bleary, and stand behind me, looking out. They saw nothing, of course. Just the black mass of pines and the drooping branches of a weeping willow. But I insisted. ‘He’s standing by the tree. He’s wearing a long coat. He has a lantern.’ They tried to soothe me, tucked me back under the quilt, and lay beside me until my breathing evened out.

The old man never came closer. That’s what my mother said. He just stood at the same spot, night after night, a dim glow at his side that I said was a lantern, though it never flickered or swayed. I described his face as gaunt, with deep hollows under his eyes, and a beard that hung to his chest. I told them he was smiling. That was the part my mother found most unsettling—that I described his smile as kind, as if he were greeting an old friend.

We lived there for a year and a half. In all that time, I never once pointed the torch anywhere else. I’d wake, go to the window, and find him there. Sometimes I’d wave. My mother cried the morning I told her, ‘The man says we have to leave soon, but he’ll miss me.’ She and my stepfather didn’t question it. They’d already been planning to move, and within the month we were gone.

Years later, when I was old enough to understand, my mother took me back to see the place. The cottages were gone, replaced by a parking lot for the new wing of the hospital. But the forest was still there, the pine trees taller. I stood on the tarmac and looked toward the spot where the old man used to stand. I expected to feel nothing, but instead I felt a deep, quiet sadness, like I’d lost something I never truly had.

On the drive home, my mother told me I’d done one other thing that she’d never told me before. The last night we spent in that cottage, I’d turned the torch away from the window for the first time. I’d shone it on the far wall, where a thin crack ran from the floor to the ceiling. In my high, clear voice, I’d said, ‘He’s not outside anymore. He’s in the wall now. He says he’ll come with us.’

We never spoke of it again. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I wake at 3:33, and I get the feeling of being watched. I reach for a flashlight I no longer own, and I look toward the window. The curtain stirs, though there’s no breeze. And I hear a soft, reedy voice, very close to my ear, saying, ‘You’re home.’