A Glimmer In The Mire?

"The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window." He must have seen it in the distance... seen but from the road, in the distance between the pavement and what lay in between. There was nothing else out there... but perhaps that glimmer in his mind. IT WAS AS THOUGH HE WERE INVITED BY THE HAUNTING ECHO OFF THRU THE FOGGED EVE, "Hoohoot hoo-hoot" and the dancing light of the candle. Along the road were hand-etched headstones. Engraved with the likeness of a carcass. We had all heard the story before. A carcass of the previous person who was now reduced to nothing except a pile of slimed flesh reminiscent of things already long buried. The flesh of things and folk long before our time would soon deteriorate and resemble a layer of ash. Flesh once subtle with life-giving juices. The fluid of life that runs dry with time. Flesh leaks fluid and eventually sags into self until there is nothing. Nothing but dust. Dust is to dust, and ever shall be. As the fog crept thick about them, mother and children huddled tightly awaiting notice of the man's return. He had stepped out of and away from the car suggesting that he would seek help for the stalled engine. He stepped away just before the first low "Hoohoot... hoo-hoot" pierced the heavy fog. Owls were common in the rural preserve, as such the sound never startled him. It did not touch his attention beyond the grasp of the glimmer of light, the fog, and the aura of death that found and drew him near. No one else had wandered that far or in that way... as far as we knew. The overgrowth of plants hung low, never shorn for keeping what was inside them... no one ventured there, beyond the roadway. This night nothing of substance was visible, including the man in his departure. Nothing except the occasional emergence of an outline of a headstone. He had stopped the car and stepped away. He'd not raised the hood or set a blinking caution light. He'd simply stepped away.

As one is always prone to do... in any inconvenient situation, a child, the daughter, had asked to use the bathroom. the bathroom that did not exist out here. There never are bathrooms, not even a port-a-potty at the edge of the road of a cemetery. But he stopped. With only a few blocks until they would arrive home, the man had reasoned that it was better to stop the car for "her comfort." He pulled off the road and stopped even in the heavy fog, nothing visible beyond the handle on the outside of the car door; stopped without knowing exactly where along the roadway. They were stopped in time for a child who, with pressure at her bladder, sought early release. The car stopped and she lept out through the back door, squatted in the grass outside her door, and within minutes, was back inside out of the cool dampness of the late night's cover. The man, confident that he had made the right decision, pasted a smile upon his face as a sign of gratification. He had done well and was pleased with himself. He turned around in his seat to restart the engine only to result in a sharp "skreeeel" of metal grazing metal. Again and again, he twisted the key in the ignition only to get the same result. He, could not believe that only minutes ago with the engine running warm and this brief pause in action... there was no previous problem, the engine would not turn over. The car sat dead. He had opened the door, stepped out into the mud at his end of the car, and walked to the front of the car as if to raise the hood. The light of the now full moon showed brightly into the fog and cast now visible glints of stones. Marble statuettes which ejected from the moist earth were visible as were the shadows which danced about them. Dead silence hung in the air around them. Dead except for the sucking of mud and an interspersed barking of a distant dog broke through the sound barrier in this parking space. It was well after midnight. No cars traveled this section of the roadway in the late hours. No additional vehicles approached this section of Steger Road. This hour of night was rarely traveled here because of the cemetery. It was said to be haunted, It aroused the town's interest as it did the entire local suburban area; the shadows which crept about on a full moon's night. The shadows that came to life in a visible state in the heavy fog that frequented the small cemetery and the length of Steger Road. Western Avenue to the edge of Stunkel Road overlaid heavy in fog or dark mist on nights usually after 12:00 pm. The air hung heavy not in pollution, but in the mysticism of things that had happened and gone unexplained. Things that crept through windows of houses in the area and of things that moved or came missing without incident of entry, fingerprint, or awareness. It was the weird things of the night that reached out and called out, caused weird behavior and strange resolve in this area... in the fogged night of this area. In the night no one knew just what caused the change.

The mother's mind dashed almost frantic with a recall of local news... the small blue house up the road and the tales of how it repeatedly burned to the ground only to be rebuilt. It had burned three times since they had moved into the neighborhood. Each time there was no explanation. The fire department and neighbors could not resolve an investigatory explanation. Some claimed the owner burned it down while doing drugs. There were no electrical hazards and no children.

It was only that he had wandered off into the midnight air, into the mire, and toward a sound and glimmer of light from a candle seen only by him in the darkness where nothing was known to be. He said there was a cabin. No one else had seen it.