The Lanternman’s Grate

I was a sophomore at Thornwood Bible College, nestled in the hills of western Pennsylvania, when I realized my laundry quarters were better spent on gas money and late-night gas station burritos. The campus was a postcard dream: red-brick Georgian buildings, manicured lawns, and a chapel whose steeple sliced the clouds. But beauty has a hunger, and I had a wallet that echoed. So, in September of 2004, I took a job as a dining hall porter at the old Holloway Hall, a relic that had once housed consumptives when the land was a sanatorium.

The work was sweat and grease, scraping trays and scouring kettles under the flickering fluorescent lights. But the pay was okay, and the evening shift let me sleep in. The worst part was the trash run. After the dinner rush, I’d haul black bags out to a dumpster in the service alley, past the loading dock, and along a wall of ivy that covered a rusted grate. One night, as I dragged a bag, my foot slipped through a depression in the asphalt, and I looked down to see a gap where the grate met the concrete. A pair of eyes, glinting like wet coal, stared back.

I told my manager, a chain-smoking lifer named Delia, about the grate. She paled, stubbed her cigarette, and said, ‘That’s the old tunnel entrance. They used to wheel the dying down there, to keep them from bothering the others. It wasn’t for the living to see.’ When I pressed her, she said, ‘The Lanternman. That’s what the old-timers call him. He kept the lanterns lit down there, before the electricity. They say he never left. He’s looking for his marbles.’ I laughed, but she didn’t. ‘Just stay out, kid. The tunnels are sealed, but the grate is loose. Don’t be curious.’

I was curious. One night, during a slow shift, I borrowed a flashlight from the maintenance closet and squeezed through the grate. The tunnel dropped into darkness, the air thick with chalk dust and the sour smell of old medicine. The walls were tiled like a bathhouse, but with names and dates scratched into the surfaces. ‘E. Thorne, 1921.’ ‘M. Walsh, 1919.’ I felt a draft, and the flashlight beam caught a glint: a round, glass object lying in a corner. It was a marble, sky-blue with a swirl of white. I pocketed it, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature.

That night, I dreamed of a hallway lined with iron beds, each with a wheezing figure, and a tall man in a long coat carrying a lantern. He walked along the beds, touching each patient’s forehead, and as he passed, they grew quiet. At the end, he turned to me. His face was a hollow shadow, but he held out a hand. In his palm, a single marble, cloudy and cracked. He spoke in a voice like gravel scraping stone: ‘You’ll lose it, like I did. Then you’ll be one of us.’

I woke with a gasp. The marble was missing from my pocket. I tore my room apart, but it was gone. The next day, I went back to the tunnels, determined to return what I’d taken—or at least find it. The grate was easier to move now, as if it had been oiled. I descended, my flashlight flickering. I walked deeper than before, past a nurse’s station with a half-dissolved patient ledger, past a gurney with rusted straps. At a junction, I heard a low moan. I turned a corner and saw a figure in a tattered, period coat, hunched over, picking at the floor. He was rolling marbles—dozens, hundreds of them—in a circle around a rusted lantern. He didn’t look up, but he spoke, in the same gravel voice: ‘She thinks she can keep them. But they always fall through. The floor eats them.’

‘She?’ I asked, my voice trembling.

‘The nurse. She was the last one down here. When the hospital closed, she stayed. She walks the tunnels, collecting things. Lost things. She has my marbles now.’ He finally looked up, and his eyes were two pits of black. ‘But you touched one. Now she’ll come for you.’

I backed away, but the tunnel behind me had filled with a pale fog. A figure emerged—a woman in a stained white uniform, her hair a gray tangle, her hands clutching a tin basin. She smiled, and her teeth were brown and broken. ‘You found my special one,’ she said, holding up the blue marble I’d pocketed. ‘But I have a gift for you.’ She reached into her apron and pulled out a key—an old, iron skeleton key. ‘This opens the old ward doors. You’ll need it for your new job.’

I woke in my dorm room, the key cold in my fist. My roommate said I’d been walking in my sleep, muttering about marbles. I tried to put it behind me, but the key stayed on my nightstand. A week later, I woke to find my laundry gone—sheets, jeans, everything—replaced by a neat stack of folded, moth-eaten hospital gowns. In the pocket, the blue marble.

I went back to the grate that night, but it was welded shut with fresh weld beads. I found Delia in the kitchen, scrubbing a pot with furious energy. When I showed her the key, she dropped the pot. ‘You opened the ward,’ she whispered. ‘The old ward. The one where they kept the ones who couldn’t breathe, the ones who needed the machines. Down there, the Lanternman’s lantern still burns. And the nurse… she’s got a friend now.’

That was three years ago. I never finished my degree. I moved away, but I kept the key, and I wear it around my neck under my shirt. Because every night, at 2 AM, I hear a rattling at my apartment door. And when I open the peephole, I see the grate—miles away but somehow right there—and a flicker of light. The Lanternman’s lantern. He’s looking for his marbles. And the nurse is laughing, because she’s got me.