The Last Frame of the Lantern Show

The old projector in the attic had been a wedding gift to my great-grandparents, a relic from the early days of cinema. For years it sat dormant under a tarp, until I found it one rainy Saturday. I was new to the town of Millbrook, a place where the fog clung to the cobblestones like a second skin, and the only job I could get was as a night technician at the local museum. The house I rented was a Victorian with crooked floors and a humming furnace, and it had been silent for weeks after I moved in. That silence, as they say, was the first ghost.

One evening, I decided to test the projector. I bought a spool of old film from a junk shop, its metal canister rusted and smelling of mothballs. I set it up in the attic, aimed at the blank wall where a window once let in light. When I flicked the switch, the reel clicked and spun, throwing a grainy, sepia image: a man in a long duster and a wide-brimmed hat, standing in a field. He turned his head slowly, as if looking directly at me, and his face was a void, a black hole in the film. The image froze, then skipped, and he was gone. I thought it was a malfunction, but the film had no such frame.

The next morning, I saw him in the hallway. Not a photograph, but a silhouette, his hat brim low, his coat still as if made of stone. He stood at the end of the corridor, half-turned, like a gunslinger in a standoff. I blinked, and he was gone. The feeling was not of terror but of profound wrongness, as if the universe had hiccuped. I told my neighbor, an old woman named Mrs. Gable, and she crossed herself. ‘That’s the Lantern Man,’ she said. ‘He comes for those who watch too much.’ I laughed, but her fear was real.

Over the weeks, the visits grew. He appeared in mirrors, in the reflection of the kettle, on the static of the television. Each time, his image was in that same posture: hand hovering near his hip, as if about to draw. I started to document it, took photos, but every picture came out blurred or black, as if he consumed the light. The house grew colder, and the projector started turning on by itself, clicking through frames of the same man in different landscapes: the center of a bridge, the middle of a cornfield, the edge of a cliff.

One night, I woke to the sound of the projector spinning. I climbed to the attic, and the image was different. Instead of the field, it showed my own house, and I was in the frame, sleeping. The man was standing by my bed. I turned, and he was there, in the attic doorway. For the first time, he moved. He lifted his hand, but not to draw. He pointed to the projector. On the wall, the film showed a new scene: a courtroom, and a judge with a face of static. The judge mouthed words I couldn’t hear, and the man nodded. I felt a wrenching in my chest, and the world went dark.

I woke on the floor of the attic. The projector was off, the film snapped. I never saw the Lantern Man again. But now, when I walk through the house, I catch myself glancing at reflections, expecting to see him in the corner of my eye. And sometimes, just sometimes, I hear the faint click of a projector, and I see a hatch open in the wall of my den, revealing a dark passage I swore was never there. I know if I step through, I will find the field, and he will be waiting, his hand raised, not to shoot, but to offer a frame from which there is no return.