A Light In The Dark

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. We saw the illumination through a gap in the trees, and the three of us froze. In the sudden hush, I became aware of the proliferation of sounds in the surrounding dark; the heavy, damp air was alive with the stridulations of crickets, the calls of frogs, and the barest susurration of wind. A rabbit screamed in the distance.

“It’s there,” Professor Ruiz breathed, and I was surprised to hear a slight shakiness in her voice. “Good God, I mean I knew that it was a possibility, but…”

“It was a probability,” I corrected gently. “All of your research pointed to tonight being the night. I don’t know about you, but I would be happy to take a win at this point.”

“Let’s not count our chickens yet, ladies,” Alan said quietly from behind us.

“Of course not,” I replied, a bit curtly.

“Sorry,” Alan said, and I could hear the shrug in his voice. “I’m still not convinced that we’re going to uncover any secrets that the countless people searching before us haven’t found, lit candle notwithstanding.”

I ignored him. It was a painfully familiar conversation between us. Isabella gave me a sidelong, knowing glance.

“Would you just start rolling?” she asked, turning to face him and giving him the exasperated look that I had come to be absurdly fond of.

“Sheesh, yeah, hold your horses, okay?” Alan grumbled, hoisting the video camera to his shoulder and fiddling with several different dials. The forest was tarred over by the impossibly dark brush of a night with no moon, and Alan had equipped an (incredibly pricey, or so he told me) infrared light for the occasion.

I straightened my jacket and brushed the hair out of my eyes, and I felt Isabella doing the same next to me, though we both knew that the garish green glow of the night vision would make us look ghoulish either way. Alan adjusted slightly, framing the shot, and the red light winked on in the darkness.

“In three, two…” Alan intoned, in decreasing volume.

“Good evening everyone, and welcome to Bump In The Night,” I said, my voice slipping unconsciously into my subtly smoother, deeper, and (in my mind) more mature radio persona. “I am your host, Stephanie Taylor, and I am joined tonight by the inimitable Isabella Ruiz, armchair supernatural detective and real life Professor of Mythology and Folklore. Behind the camera tonight is Alan Walker. If you haven’t listened to episode forty-two, “A Light in the Dark,” I highly recommend you do so before viewing this. Another huge thank you to all of our Patreon supporters that made our first foray into a video-supplemented episode possible.”

I start backing slowly toward the cabin, trying to walk carefully and silently.

“If you haven’t listened to ‘A Light in the Dark,’ allow me to lay out a not-so-succinct recap. It’s 1852, and Theodore Larsen is living in a small cabin in rural Pennsylvania with his wife and two children. By all accounts a normal family, devouts of the Quaker faith, their one and only recorded complaint as being “a bit of the private sort.” In modern parlance, they lived somewhere deep in the wooded foothills of the Allegheny Range, kept to themselves, and weren’t known to invite their fellow churchgoers to afternoon tea.

“Despite their apparent aloofness, the other congregants were bound to notice when an unerringly habitual family one day decides to not show up. Fearing for the health of the Larsen’s, a man named Clarence Morris and two other unnamed congregants ride into the thick woods where the family is rumored to live…”

Alan pans the camera across the legion of trees, then jumps a bit.

“Sorry,” he mouths, “Raccoon eyes jumped out at me.”

“You’ll have to pardon us,” I said, grinning sheepishly as the camera returns to my face. “Not used to doing fieldwork in the dead of night.”

“The search party winds up a bit lost, and the daylight is all but drained from the sky when Clarence Morris and company find the rutted track that leads to the Larsen’s cabin. They are heartened to find that a candle is burning at the western window. Clarence enters first, calling out for Theodore and his family, and when he is satisfied that no one is home, he blows out the candle in the window, relying instead on the glow of his lantern. He calls the other two inside, and they make a more thorough search.” I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a folded paper and my cell phone, and read by the light of my lock screen.

“From the journal of Clarence Morris:

“The search didn’t take but a few moments; the cabin was completely empty. Not a stick of furniture remained. T’was clear that Theo had packed up his family and set off. We were just finishing our search when I spied one of the lads looking at me queerly, and he were a bit pale of complexion. ‘Mr. Morris, when did ye go for a trim?’ he asked of me, gesturing at my visage. I raised a hand to my beard and hair and found that both had shortened considerably from the time we left town to that moment. I took an involuntary step back in wonderment, and that is when I stepped on the bones… Small, they were, and fragile. In the wavering shadow of my lantern, the tiny skulls leered up from the floor. I am unashamed to admit, I let out a cry of terror and was out the door as if the devil himself were hot on my footsteps.”

I replaced the folded paper in my pocket and looked into the lens, surprised at how comfortable I was in front of the camera, thinking to myself that we might actually get this in one take.

“This case rocked the small Quaker community. The local constabulary was stymied, turn after turn. The bones that Morris found were those of infants, but no one in the surrounding area had reported a baby missing, let alone four. The Larsens had vanished, seemingly without a trace. Theories abound, but this case has never been solved, and has since entered into rural legend. Most notably spoken of in the intervening years are three distinct oddities: first is the seeming impermanence of the location of the Larsen’s cabin, which tended to elude thrill-seekers and investigators despite having been found and documented many times. Second is the passage in the journal describing Clarence’s cropped hair, which is the only recorded reference we could find. And then there is the third, eeriest aspect which eventually led us here- the light that burns in the dark.”

I stepped to the side, allowing the shambling contours of the rough-hewn cabin to fill the frame. Underneath the woodland sounds I could hear the mechanical whir of the lenses shifting to get a close-up of the candle burning. I waited another moment, then stepped back into frame as Alan nodded.

“When this tale entered into local myth, the focal point of the story is always the candle that burns in the window. Legend says that if you can find the cabin in its original place on just the right night, the Larsen family will communicate with you by burning a candle in the window, just the same as they did the night they vanished…”

“Well, friends, thanks to the talents and persistence of Professor Ruiz, I think we have finally found that which has eluded all of those intrepid explorers of the occult that have come before us. Our exhaustive research may at last be rewarded, and perhaps tonight we may just find a clue as to what may have happened to a Quaker family, almost a century and a half-ago tonight…”

I smiled, hoping for a look of mysterious intrigue, and began walking toward the cabin while Isabella laid out some of the finer points of her research. I admired how tactfully she laid out information- enough to explain, but not enough to reveal. It was something we had discussed beforehand; we didn’t want anyone trying to follow our trail out here on the off chance that there was anything dangerous to be found at the Larsen’s cabin.

The candle burned ahead of me, oddly bright and unwavering. Away from the camera, I felt the first prickle of unease sweep through me. Bump in the Night had taken me on a wild ride through the macabre and dreadful, and while I still had a healthy skepticism about all things paranormal and supernatural, I had seen enough in the last three years to convince me that while most tales had perfectly reasonable explanations, there was still something out there that worked by a different set of rules. This cabin- just a story we had picked up on not long ago, rife with impossible ideas like wandering dwellings and ephemeral lights- slipped at that moment abruptly and inexorably from story to truth. There was something here, something wrong and outside of our narrow perception. I shivered in the dark, and suddenly felt that I didn’t want to go inside.

“Ready?” Isabella asked, stepping beside me. I wasn’t, not at all, but I felt her give my hand a quick squeeze, so I nodded and summoned a weak smile. The door loomed in front of us, splintery and rough but impossibly sturdy looking. The simple iron handle was cold to the touch. I pushed it open, bracing for the creak of timeworn hinges, but it swung open in silence, and the shadowy interior came into relief. There was no furniture, just a low-ceilinged room with a partition creating a small bedroom in the corner and a wood stove standing on a raised stone foundation. We stepped inside onto the dirt floor, and Alan entered behind us.

Immediately I felt… Disappointment mingled with relief. Whatever I expected- a rush of understanding, bones on the floor, a hidden message from Theodore Larsen- wasn’t going to be found here. The cabin was just a cabin- old and dusty, a reliquary for the hopes of the gullible and foolish. I could almost sense the others' feelings as well- Isabella’s mute letdown, Alan’s somehow grim smugness.

“Let’s film everything we can,” I said bracingly, walking slowly around the perimeter of the room in a clockwise direction, leaving the candle for last. What was so striking about the inside of this place was that it was almost pristine; normally sites like this- especially those steeped in folklore- quickly fell victim to the whims of teenagers armed with spray paint or knives or alcohol.

I poked my head around the partition, where I supposed the bedroom to be. The candle’s light didn’t reach around the corner, so I took out my cell phone and clicked on the flashlight, feeling a slight smile tug the edge of my mouth as Alan winced behind me. The room was as empty as the rest of the house, but on the back of the partition, I saw something that might make this journey worth it.

“Alan, come get this,” I whispered, backing up to view the wall in full.

Upon the wall was a mixture of scratches, burns, rough-hued paint, and charcoal, muddled together in a messy but competent scene; a woman was being carried by a great dark bird over a forest of blackened timbers. In her arms was a basket of faded gold-daubed apples, and above, written in the sky in what I had originally taken to be scratches, was a long string of runes.

“This doesn’t look very Quaker,” Alan muttered from behind me.

“It’s Iðunn,” Isabella breathed, walking up to trace the runes with her fingers.

“Sorry?”

“Iðunn… She was a sort of fertility goddess in Norse mythology. She kept the apples that guaranteed the gods their eternal youth. Wonder what it is doing here? Ouch!”

She withdrew her hand quickly from the wall. A bead of blood, painfully red in the cell phone’s light, had formed on her finger.

“Are you okay?” I asked, taking her hand. There was a long, thin needle of wood puncturing the skin there. We made brief eye contact and she nodded, so I gingerly tugged it out for her and dropped it on the floor. That prickling feeling rippled over my back again.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

“Of course,” I said, smiling at her. Alan cleared his throat.

“Well,” she said, “Oftentimes families that came to America from overseas carried vestiges of old beliefs with them. Perhaps this is a holdover from the Larsen’s homeland.”

“And who wouldn’t be interested in eternal youth?” I asked, looking closer at the mural.

There was sudden darkness as my cell phone battery died. I frowned in the gloom, knowing that I had had it fully charged when I left for the woods.

“Would you please give me a warning when you are changing light sources?” Alan said testily.

“Sorry, that was unintentional,” I said, and I clapped my hand to the base of my neck, where I had felt a brush of something, like a drifting cobweb or the scuttle of an insect.

What the hell?

The brushing sensation had been caused by the ends of my own hair, which normally cascaded down just past the tops of my shoulders. It was like it had been lopped off by something in the darkness.

“Somebody please shine a light on me,” I said, my voice rising shrilly. “Somebody shine a light on me right fucking now!”

“What’s going on?” Alan said, and I could see the dim shape of Isabella frantically digging her phone out of her pocket and I screamed as I felt my hair literally crawling backwards into my scalp. A light flashed on and Isabella gasped, and immediately the light tumbled to the ground.

“Stephanie, what is happening?” Isabella cried, the panic in her voice resonating with my own. I quickly knelt, my body registering the fact that the ground was closer than before even if my mind didn’t. I grabbed the phone and shined it upward. Sharp shadows leapt from Alan and Isabella and seemed to caper on the wall behind them as they flailed. Isabella was running her hands through her own dark curls, which had also receded inches in the last few moments. Alan looked as though he was fighting with his flannel shirt, its sleeves now draping over his fingers, suddenly a size too large. I stared in mute horror at the two of them for another moment before my instincts fired back to life.

“C’mon!” I screamed, reaching unthinking for Isabella’s hand first, noting in some distant, remote part of my brain how delicate and childlike the fingers felt. I ran around the partition, my feet slipping in my tennis shoes, half-dragging Isabella through the length of the cabin, which somehow felt so much larger than it had when we entered. The ceiling vaulted above us, the distance between the bedroom and the doorway stretched, and each step seemed to clear less distance than the last. I chanced a look back and saw Alan stumbling behind us in a way that was almost comical- like he had been playing dress up in his father’s clothing. Even the way his eyes bugged out and his mouth gaped open like a fish was borderline hysterical, and a screaming laugh ripped from my throat. The doorway into the night beckoned, the candle flickered. Clarence Morris flashed improbably in my mind, and I should have blown out that cursed thing, even in my madness I knew that, but I needed to get the two of us through that doorway. I put on a burst of speed, nearly tripping on my pants, and leapt across the threshold. In the moment of crossing, I felt something moving inside of me cease. Isabella’s hand nearly slipped from mine but I squeezed with all my might and together we flew into the night, tumbling into the fragrant duff of moldering pine. The woods around us were deadly silent, as if a dome of glass had settled down around the cabin.

I laid there, panting, crying, inhaling deep lungfuls of balsam and pine, feeling the bite of needles and branches, and I heard an anguished cry and the crash of the camera falling on the dirt floor inside. I dreaded looking, but I couldn’t stop myself. I curled into the fetal position and locked eyes with Alan as he crawled toward the door, still trapped in his clothes. His eyes looked out pleadingly from a boyish face.

“The candle,” I whispered numbly, tears spilling down my face. He looked up at it, and I knew that I had damned him. He finally extricated himself from his shirt and his small body walked, then crawled, slowly, oh my God so slowly, toward the window, and he disappeared from view beneath the flickering light. I watched the window, feeling the warmth of Isabella’s small form and the hitching of her breath beside me, and I waited for a hand to reach up and knock the candle over, but there was nothing.

“Alan?” Isabella said, her voice high, not in the shrill register of panic but in the clean tones of a much younger girl. I wanted to roll over, take her in my arms, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear to see what was in the place of the woman I had come to love over the course of this.

So I laid there, and I watched as the cabin flickered, the trees behind it coming into focus for the barest of moments.

“Alan?” I called, hearing a girl's voice that I hadn’t heard in some twenty years issue from my throat.

A baby wailed in the darkness of the woods, just once, and then there was silence.