The Lantern Tree

When I was a boy, we lived on a small, wind-scoured island called Kestrel’s Rest, where the sea gnawed at the cliffs and the fog rolled in like a second tide. The island had its own quiet superstitions, whispered among the fishing families, but the one that stuck with me was about the old oak that stood at the edge of the schoolyard. The tree was ancient, its roots cracking the pavement, its branches thick with moss. On warm nights, hundreds of tiny lights would pulse among the leaves, like the tree had swallowed a piece of the starry sky. The locals called them ‘lanterns,’ but they were not fireflies; they were the eyes of the dead, they said, or the souls of the drowned, keeping watch. And if you disturbed the tree, if you climbed it or broke a branch, you’d find your own light missing soon enough.

That autumn, the school held its annual camping weekend for the older students. Normally, we pitched our tents on the beach and spent our days building bonfires and telling ghost stories, but a cold snap had swept in from the north, turning the nights bitter and damp. The scoutmaster, a stern man named Mr. Havelock, decided we would sleep indoors rather than risk frostbite. He allowed us to use two classrooms: the science room, which was closest to the oak, and the old home economics building, a squat, drafty structure near the back fence. I was in the science room, along with nine other boys. We set up our sleeping bags in rows between the lab tables, and the big windows faced directly out towards the oak.

The first night was uneventful, though none of us slept well. The heating system wheezed and clanked, and the wind rattled the glass. But the second night, something changed. I woke to a strange glow filtering through my eyelids. When I opened my eyes, the room was bathed in a soft, greenish light that pulsed in a slow, rhythmic pattern, like a heartbeat. I sat up and saw the others were awake too, staring out the window. The oak was blazing with lights, far more than I’d ever seen. They weren’t just in the branches; they were swirling around the trunk, collecting on the ground, forming a vortex that spun slowly. And in the center of the vortex, I saw a shape: a woman, translucent and wavering, like heat rising off asphalt. She was reaching out a hand, beckoning to us, and her mouth moved silently, forming words we couldn’t hear.

One of the boys, Marcus, who was always the bold one, laughed nervously and said, ‘It’s just a trick of the light.’ He walked to the gate and began to open it. We shouted for him to stop, but he didn’t. He stepped onto the lawn, and the lights swarmed around him, clinging to his clothes, his hair, his skin. He seemed to glow from within for a moment, and then he collapsed. The lights scattered, and the woman vanished. We rushed out to him, and he was breathing but unconscious. We carried him back to the classroom, and by morning he was fine, except he couldn’t remember anything from that night. But he had a strange mark on his arm, a small, perfectly round burn that looked like the imprint of a lantern.

The next night, the glow returned, but it was angrier, pulsing faster. The woman was there again, and this time she was not beckoning; she was pointing at us, her finger trembling, her mouth contorted in a silent scream. And we saw more shapes in the shadows: children, their eyes like brass buttons, their faces blank. They stood behind her, swaying in unison, and they reached out with tiny hands. We barricaded the door, but the lights seeped through the keyhole, through the cracks in the window frames, and they writhed on the floor like living threads. We huddled in the center of the room, and I realized that each of us had a faint glow at our chests, our own little lanterns. The lights were reaching for them.

I don’t know what came over me, but I remembered an old story my grandmother told me: that the lanterns are drawn to those who carry a light inside, and the only way to appease them is to give them something precious, something of your own. I pulled out the small pocketknife my father had given me, the one I cherished more than anything. I walked to the window, ignoring the screams of my friends, and I pushed the window open. The lights surged in, swirling around me, and I felt a sting as a hundred tiny mouths bit into my skin. I held out the knife, and the woman’s hand wrapped around it, icy cold. Her fingers closed, and the knife turned to rust, then to dust. She smiled, and the lights receded into the tree, becoming still and quiet.

By morning, the tree was just a tree again, but something had changed. The lanterns were gone, and the oak looked withered, its leaves brown and curling. We never spoke of that night, and the camping weekend ended early. But I noticed that the mark on Marcus’s arm grew fainter, and he would sometimes stop and stare at nothing, his eyes unfocused. And every year on that same night, the lights return, but they stay in the tree, and I see her face in the window of my room, watching, waiting for the next child who steps too close.