The Red Lantern’s Dance

It was a Tuesday night, the kind where the fog rolled in off the bay and made the streetlights bleed. I was parked in Ruby’s sedan, waiting for Jules to finish his shift at the fish cannery. Ruby was in the backseat, fiddling with his phone, and I was leaning against the hood, trying to keep the joint’s high from wearing off too quick. About a hundred feet down the road, where the fog was thickest, I saw a red light. It was small, like a dying cigarette, but it blinked in a rhythm that didn’t match anything man-made.

I squinted, my glasses forgotten on the dash. ‘Hey, Ruby, you see that?’ I pointed. The red light was moving now, tracing lazy circles and figure eights in the air, like it was writing something only the fog could read. Ruby looked up, his eyes narrowing. He’d been weird about the bay since his uncle’s boat went missing two years back. He said, ‘That’s not a drone. And it’s not a plane.’ He got out of the car, leaving the door open, and walked a few steps forward, his boots crunching on the gravel. The light stopped moving, hovering dead center of the road. It pulsed faster, as if it was angry.

I called out, ‘Maybe it’s a kid with a laser pointer?’ But Ruby shook his head. ‘No. Look at the way it moves. It’s not bouncing off anything. It’s the source.’ He pulled out his phone and started recording, but the screen flickered and went dark. The light darted closer, hovering just over a storm drain, and that’s when I felt the cold. Not the bay cold, but a deep, biting chill that seemed to come from inside my chest. The red light began to descend, settling onto the metal grate, and it spread, like it was painting the ground with a thin layer of blood. Ruby whispered, ‘It’s a harbinger. My uncle saw one the night his boat went down.’ He grabbed my arm, his fingers digging in. ‘We need to leave. Now.’

But I couldn’t move. The light was forming a shape – a twisted, skeletal hand, reaching up from the drain, the fingers long and wrong. It didn’t grab anything, just hovered there, as if waiting for permission. Ruby was already in the car, starting the engine, yelling at me. But I was frozen, watching the hand begin to write in the fog, letters that burned red and then faded. It spelled ‘MINE’ and then ‘NEXT’. I stumbled backward, falling into the car, and Ruby floored it. We were a mile down the coast before either of us spoke. Ruby’s face was pale, his hands shaking on the wheel. ‘That was a demon, Marcus. A low-level one, sure, but it was marking territory.’ I laughed, nervously. ‘Demons don’t exist.’ But Ruby didn’t laugh. He said, ‘You heard your uncle, the one who used to fish these waters. He believed in the Red Lantern. He used to say it was a warning, that if you saw it dance, you had a week to make amends.’

We went back the next day, both sober, to see if we could find any evidence. The storm drain was there, but it was ordinary, covered in rust and leaves. There was no red light, not even a reflection. But as we stood there, a fishing boat drifted past, empty, its engine idling. No one was on board. The radio crackled, and a voice, garbled, came through: ‘The lantern knows your name.’ Ruby grabbed my wrist and pointed at the boat’s hull. Painted in fading red was a symbol we hadn’t noticed before – a crude eye with a crossed-out pupil. ‘That’s the mark he left on his boat,’ Ruby said. ‘It means he was claimed.’ We drove back without speaking.

That was three months ago. I’ve seen the red light every night since, not always in the same place, but always at the edge of my vision, dancing its figure eights. It’s in my apartment, on my ceiling, whenever I turn off the lights. And last night, it wrote on my wall: ‘You were the one who saw me first.’ My girlfriend, Anna, thinks I’m going crazy. She can’t see it, but I can feel the cold. And when I look in the mirror, my eyes are always slightly red, even in the daylight. I haven’t told Ruby, but I know he’s seen it too. His phone died the night we saw the hand, but he got it fixed. He said there was a video on it, but it was just static, except for one frame. That frame showed my face, lit by the red light, and behind me, a tall, thin figure with too many joints, reaching out. I don’t sleep much anymore. But the red light keeps dancing, waiting for me to finish the last step. I found a note under my door this morning, written in red ink: ‘You have one week left to make amends.’ I don’t know what I did wrong. But I know the lantern’s dance is a promise, and mine is about to end.