By the Light of His Lantern

by Abe Moss

  “What is it?” Lewis asked again.

  He could see Harvey quite well in the light of the fire. Both of them. When he realized this he looked over his shoulder into the wagon, not only to see the others better but to see if they watched it too. But they didn’t. They slept on, undisturbed, shrouded in their own tired gloom.

  “That’s my home,” Harvey said.

  Lewis looked back, as they were leaving it now, and took in each of its fire-breathing windows. It might have been a lovely home once.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said, boy. That’s mine.”

  “It’s on fire!”

  “I can see that. Yes, I can see that.”

  Lewis faced forward again. He cast his eyes on the small, insignificant flame cradled in his lap.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you haven’t been here long. I can see it in your face. But you’ve experienced the darkness as we all have. It does things. You know that. Sometimes it sets things loose upon us. Sometimes it shows us things from our past. All in a relentless mission to cause us suffering…”

  “What does it mean, then?”

  “What does what mean?”

  “Your house back there.”

  “Ah. It’s a long story.”

  Lewis looked around them theatrically.

  “I think we have time.”

  Harvey sighed. “It’s really not very interesting. It’s just one sad story in a sea of thousands here. You’ll get bored of them eventually.”

  “Go on.”

  Harvey eyed him skeptically. Lewis eyed him back.

  “It’s not much,” Harvey said. “It’s just where things started to fall apart for me. Not actually a long story at all, I just don’t much enjoy telling it.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Well, that was my home. It was also home to my wife and two daughters before I set fire to it while they slept inside.”

  The warmth bled out of Lewis’s face. Out of his hands, too.

  “W-why did you do it!?”

  “I was sick.”

  Lewis didn’t speak for a minute after that, and Harvey didn’t seem too keen on elaborating. So they sat side by side, a strange chill borne in the air between them, and Lewis tried to think of anything he could to say.

  “That’s the cruelest part of ending up here,” Harvey said. “Back home, alive, people don’t understand. And why should they? I did a terrible thing. I hurt a lot of people besides the ones whose lives I stole. But I was sick, like I said. And maybe that’s no excuse. Probably not. Her family certainly didn’t think so…” Lewis finally started to speak but Harvey interrupted him. “And that’s the cruelest part, like I said. I’m not sick anymore. Not here in this place. Everything is clear to me now. I can remember the things I did with this clarity and I got no option but to reflect on them forever. The man in those memories isn’t me. I don’t know who he was. But I’m not him anymore. And yet here I am… paying for his crimes…”

  Lewis looked back a final time.

  “It’s gone,” he said. He looked to Harvey, who stared dead ahead into the dark where there was nothing to see. “It’s gone!”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “It just vanished!”

  “As things are prone to do.”

  Some time passed and Lewis closed his eyes a bit longer, but his mind wasn’t nearly as at ease as it had been.

  “How often do you see that?” he asked Harvey.

  “See what now?”

  “Your home back there. Burning like that.”

  “Oh, here and there. I’m used to it by now.”

  Lewis thought it would be best not to ask Harvey anything more about it. It was a sensitive topic, to be sure.

  “I hurt someone too,” Lewis said. His throat grew a lump as he said it, and he couldn’t believe he had.

  “Yeah, I figure everyone here’s hurt somebody—”

  “I killed someone, actually.” He tried to swallow the lump down. It only got bigger. Fire shadows danced wildly over his lap, over the horses in front of him and he realized he was shaking terribly. “A little girl…”

  “Ah, so you were sick, too.”

  “I think… I mean, I…”

  He couldn’t finish. He wanted to say ‘I know that’s why I’m here’ but instead his throat balled up completely and he couldn’t utter another word.

  It suddenly made sense to him now. Seeing her. She wasn’t real after all. The darkness showed her to him, a painful reminder, just as it showed Harvey the hellish deeds he’d done. He would never forget. She would follow him like an illness, poison him from the inside out until he went mad like the rest of them. No one in this place forgot their reasons for being there. That was the curse.

  He put his head back once more, closed his eyes. He wouldn’t sleep. Couldn’t. But he’d focus on something else—like the crunch of dirt and rocks under the creaking wagon wheels, and the hypnotizing clop of the horses’ hooves, and the comforting jostle as they carried them onward, and the growing alien stench putting its arms around them from the passengers in the back. He could focus on those things, he thought. Altogether, they were rather peaceful.

  The painful thoughts slithered back into their crevices while the atmosphere of their travels filled their absence. It was a warm, thoughtless stupor. He pretended he was somewhere else. The sun was shining there, a dull red over his closed eyelids. He felt it on him, a glow on his hands and arms, his thighs.

  For a short while Lewis escaped the suffering.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Something wrapped itself around his index finger and pulled. It pulled and pulled, very gently, until he began to lean. He roused only when he fell against his shoulder. Pushing himself up, he immediately grabbed the lantern which had rolled off his lap and sat too close to the edge of the seat for his comfort.

  The wagon was stopped and he was alone.

  “Harvey?”

  He looked over his shoulder into the wagon bed, held out the lantern to get a better look. All that was there were bones. Piles of bones, dirty and without shine.

  “Harvey?”

  He leaned forward in his seat and extended the lantern there and found the horses gone as well. It was just him and the wagon…

  There was a strange chatter in the air. When he sat still for a moment he heard it, a very distant commotion, but what he recognized almost surely as the sound of many voices all together, crowds of people, shouting and… possibly… laughing?

  “I think we’re here.”

  Lewis reared back against the seat, clutched his naked chest.

  “He took us there after all.”

  Lewis shone the firelight over the side of the wagon, to the bare dirt road underneath, and still saw no one. But her voice was there.

  Clear as day.

  Despite his strengthened conviction that she wasn’t real, he spoke to her anyhow.

  “Took us where?”

  “To the town you asked for.”

  Could it be that? he thought. He climbed down from the wagon. He felt a pang of shame for his nudity, being in plain sight of a small child. But then, if she wasn’t real, it didn’t matter…

  “What happened to Harvey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He walked a circle around the wagon and found it in much worse shape than he remembered. Almost like it had aged a hundred years.

  “Did I sleep?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He turned on her, on her nothingness, his frustration so great he felt out of breath with it.

  “Do you know anything?” She was silent. He breathed deeply. “Are you even there? Am I going out of my mind?”

  “I’m here.”

  He moved past her, ignored her, muttered to himself: “She isn’t real… none of this is real…”

  He left the wagon. By the time he was twenty feet beyond it he’d forgotten it existed. The raucous sounds of life became more deci
pherable the farther he wandered toward them, the individual voices and shouts, guffaws, the squealing of doors and other hinges, what might have even been music… Lewis followed the smooth dirt underfoot for an uncomfortable duration, the lantern revealing only his next few steps, and before long he agonized—though his pace never slowed—that the sounds he heard were tricks themselves. His chest ached with the idea. This world was cruel and torturous, but the hope he felt… it would be an altogether different kind of evil to be a farce. He’d made it this far, TOO far for the darkness’s liking, perhaps. He needed to pay his dues. He needed to be sent back to the start, to the ocean—

  THE OCEAN. He could hear it now. Behind all the human chatter and the warm goings-on in the distance, he listened as ocean waves embraced a nearby beach, kissed dagger-stones in the wet sand.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked, bitten by paranoia and terror, like insects at his ears. “Is that the ocean?”

  “I hear it,” the girl responded, following at his side. Thank god, he thought. He didn’t want to be alone. He felt so grateful to hear her voice then.

  His feet scuffed and stubbed the scars in the dirt. He’d quickened his pace without realizing. If the sounds were real, he needed to reach them before it was too late, before the darkness reached out and snared him in his singular moment of optimism.

  They were definitely by the ocean. The salt carried in the air. Wouldn’t it be a sick betrayal, Lewis thought, if Harvey had managed to somehow bring him all the way back? If it were the very same beach…

  He felt impossibly close. The voices were loud enough now to hear some of their words clearly over others.

  “Where you goin’?” a woman’s voice shouted, playful and seductive. There may have been an answer, but she was drowned out under laughter and other shouting. It was a proper sea of socialization there, wherever it was, near enough to touch.

  “Look,” the little girl said. “There’s light.”

  And there was. Narrow slits of light. Warm and dim. Lewis approached warily. He lit the space between himself and the slats of light ahead with his outstretched lantern, until its firelight bled into the new light which peeked through what was revealed to be wooden pillars. It was a wall. A border. And on the other side…

  “This is it,” Lewis said. “This must be it. There’s a town on the other side. There’s a door or a gate somewhere nearby, I know it.”

  He followed the border, much like he followed the tree-line that first time on the beach, hand slapping each pillar as he passed. The distance he walked felt twice what it was, the racing of his heart stretching time like an elastic band. Inevitably, with hope greater than his patience, he began to worry again that none of it was real. The wall would never end and he’d chase it in circles, round and round looking for an entrance that wasn’t there…

  “It’s here.”

  He stopped. The girl spoke behind him, a few paces back.

  “It’s here,” she repeated. “You passed it.”

  He retraced his steps back to her. He held his lantern up. He saw nothing he hadn’t already. He started to panic, pacing erratically, when suddenly smaller hands took hold of his.

  “Calm down,” she said. “You’ll never find anything in the dark like that.”

  She put his hands to a spot on the wall and he felt it was indeed different there. The pillars were connected by a horizontal beam, waist high. But when he pushed it nothing happened. He crouched and followed the vertical gap between the pillars and saw the shadow of a hefty latch on the other side.

  “It’s locked,” he said. “It’s barricaded by a latch.”

  Perhaps it wasn’t an entrance at all, but rather some kind of emergency exit, he wondered.

  “Maybe this isn’t an—”

  Something moved on the other side. It stood opposite them, heavy feet in the dirt, pushed itself up to the gaps so that Lewis couldn’t see the light shining through. It watched them. Then it turned away, brushed along the wall, careful and calm.

  “Wait!” Lewis called. “Wait, we’re here! We’re out here!”

  Nothing he said got their attention again. Soon they were gone.

  “This must not be it,” he said. “We have to keep looking.”

  He began following the border once more when a strange voice spoke to him through the pillars, soft and papery.

  “What are you doing out there?” it asked.

  Lewis gasped.

  “Hello?”

  “Why are you here?”

  He thought about it. “I’m looking for a town. Is this a town?”

  The other voice grew quiet.

  “Hello? Are you there?”

  “You could say this is a town… of sorts. Yes.”

  “How do I get inside?” Lewis waited a long three seconds. “How do I get inside, I said!”

  “There’s a door.”

  “Oh, gee… you don’t say…”

  “What’s that now?”

  Lewis cleared his throat. “Where is the door?”

  “You’re standing right next to it.”

  He was referring, of course, to the door Lewis had already tried and failed to open.

  “It doesn’t open.”

  “Of course it opens. It’s a door.”

  “I can’t open it, I mean.”

  “Have you even tried?”

  Lewis wanted to meet this person—he assumed it was a man, but the voice was so high and airy it could have been anyone—just so he could strangle them.

  “Please just help me. Before something…” He looked around in the dark. There was a breeze, and grass rustled around them. “I’ve come a long way.”

  “I don’t know what kind of help you expect to get opening a door. Open it yourself, for chrissake.”

  “I can’t open it from here, I’m telling you!”

  There was some tinkering on the other side—a pair of hands feeling the wood, fidgeting with something. There was a click.

  “Oh!” they said. “I see, you might be right.”

  “What was that?” Lewis asked, pressed his face to the crack between the pillars. “Did you open it?”

  The quick scampering of feet was the only response he was given. He felt for the horizontal beam and pushed, but nothing happened.

  “Pull it,” the girl said.

  “I know that.”

  Lewis pulled the bar and the wooden door still didn’t budge. Not because it was still locked, but because of how immensely heavy it was. He pulled harder and it left its frame, inch by inch, scratching and digging at the dirt underneath it. Extra tiny hands felt over his in search of space to assist and the girl pulled with him. Her added effort didn’t amount to much but together they pulled and pulled, until the door was open a foot or so, and there they left it, just enough to squeeze through.

  “We should still be careful,” Lewis said.

  Through the door he saw the cold, dark backs of many buildings. They were silhouetted against dim firelight coming from somewhere deeper. From that deeper place drifted the chorus of many voices, the sounds of social gathering—raucous laughter, shrill cackling, boots clunking and dancing on old floorboards, exclamations of both awe and displeasure, cussing and hollering, wheezing, snorting, crying, clumsy sounds too. If Lewis didn’t know better…

  They slipped through the door. Like a fish drawn to a worm on a hook Lewis was drawn to the light cast between the houses, only giving the briefest pause upon setting foot inside the walls before venturing further. The girl said something to him when he started off but he wasn’t listening. She repeated herself, falling back, but still he didn’t hear.

  “Lewis,” she said in a hard tone. “Wait.”

  He emerged into a street, an intersection of beaten dirt lit by hanging torches on each corner and down the length of each avenue. Soft light bled from every window in each direction. From dark alleys and doorways figures chased and scattered, hurried in whispers of glee and secrecy. On the corner of the intersection was a lar
ge two story building, its windows the brightest and most full of life on the block. Hidden in the alley under a curtain of shadow, Lewis observed the visitors and inhabitants through the open windows there, their flame-cast shapes stretched black and cartoonish over the walls. The great majority of noise Lewis had heard previously seemed to be coming from this place. And it was much like he imagined.

  Like an old-west saloon.

  The clientele wasn’t quite the same. Many of them stark naked, others wearing rags barely discernible as clothes at all, they wandered to and fro with loony grins, sneering scowls, dreamy eyes. Some of them staggered and swayed like they were drunk but that couldn’t be the case. Consumption of anything was apt to kill them, Lewis thought. Like the old man and his coffee. And if they weren’t drunk on some substance, well… it could only be their own madness, then, couldn’t it?

  He felt a tug on his hand but when he looked he saw he was alone in the dark.

  “What.”

  “What are you looking for here?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. People continued entering and leaving the establishment across the way, each stranger than the last, and Lewis watched with increasing discouragement. “Someone who has answers.”

  He took a deep breath—could smell the sweet and sour aroma of sweat and earth and eternity—and strode toward the closed doors. He was entirely skin-bare, but it bothered him less now, seeing how many others chose similar attire. Soon he’d be more like them than he wanted to be. After the darkness had its way with him time and time again…

  Halfway there the front doors opened and a scrawny, sleepy-looking man slipped out. He dragged his bow-legged feet, knees knocked and brushed as though he’d never learned how to walk. He followed the side of the building with one hand on its exterior to brace himself. Lewis followed. From the entrance of the bar they disappeared into shadow, Lewis closing the distance between them but remaining back enough to not alert the man to his presence. They passed beneath an overhanging torch, its heat just enough to feel on the top of his head. Under the light the man’s sickliness took full form, his bones sharp and crooked, pressing up under his skin like scissor blades running beneath wet paper. When they dipped back into shadow Lewis closed the distance even more. The man’s breath buzzed like wasps, barely escaping his chest.