The Lantern of the Hollow Grove

The pine needles crunched under our boots like the breaking of small bones as we pushed deeper into the woods. It was supposed to be a simple afternoon hike, a way for me and my ex-husband, Marcus, to prove we could still be civil after the divorce. His new girlfriend, Dana, was ahead, her laughter too bright for the graying light. Behind me, my brother Tom and his friend Eli traded jokes that fell flat in the thickening silence. We had left the marked trail an hour ago, lured by a false promise of a hidden waterfall that Dana swore she remembered from a blog. Now the trees crowded in, their branches knitting together overhead until the sky was just a distant memory. Marcus checked his phone for the hundredth time. ‘No signal,’ he muttered, a vein pulsing in his temple. ‘We should turn back.’ But none of us could agree on which way ‘back’ was. So we walked. The daylight retreated like a tide pulling away, and with it, the last of my bravado. The forest changed—the familiar green gave way to an oppressive gloom, and the air grew heavy, as if the woods were holding their breath. I felt it first as a prickle on the back of my neck: the sensation of being watched. I spun around, but there was nothing but the twisted silhouettes of the trees. ‘Do you feel that?’ I asked, but Dana just rolled her eyes, and Marcus said, ‘It’s just your imagination, Lena. Get a grip.’ I wanted to believe him, but then Eli stopped and pointed. ‘Look,’ he whispered. And there, far ahead, cut into the hillside, a flickering amber glow, like a lantern swinging in a phantom hand. The light seemed to call to us, a beacon in the darkening wilderness. Despite every instinct screaming to turn back, we moved toward it. Because what else could we do? The first step was the hardest, then it became easier, as if the light itself was pulling us, a leash around our collective will. We crested a small ridge, and the source of the light came into view. In a hollow carved into the cliff, a fire burned, but it was not a campfire of logs and sparks. It was a pillar of pale blue flame, rising from a bowl of black stone, casting no shadows, and at its base sat a circle of figures. They were Native Americans, or what I took to be, their skin painted with symbols that writhed as if alive. But their forms were wrong—they flickered like heat mirages, their edges blurring, and when one of them turned its head, its eyes were hollow pits, and the firelight shone through them. I stopped dead, my feet freezing to the earth. Marcus slammed into my back, and the others spilled around me, a jumble of limbs and curses. Then silence. The figures did not move, did not speak, but I could hear them—a low, rhythmic humming that vibrated in my teeth, a sound that was not of the human throat. ‘Oh God,’ Dana breathed. A rasping voice, like dry leaves skittering, rose from the circle. It spoke in a language I did not know, yet somehow I understood: ‘The lantern wanes. A new wick is needed.’ The figures began to rise. They moved as one, their gaits jerky and wrong, like puppets with tangled strings. The fire’s light flickered, and for a moment, I saw their true forms—not men, but things wearing men like ill-fitting suits, their faces stretched in silent screams. Marcus grabbed my arm, his face pale. ‘Run,’ he whispered. But my legs were leaden, and the dark forest pressed in on all sides, and I knew, with a certainty that froze my heart, that we were not lost anymore. We had been found. And we were not meant to leave.