Bait

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Even from a distance, one could not mistake the faint, cheery glow of trembling flame for anything else. Yet its presence was incongruous with this location in time and space. Warm wavelengths of light seeped out sacriligiously into pristine darkness.

Mother Nature had diligently labored for some time to prepare the cabin for its return to her bosom. Moss nibbled around its eaves and up its shingles. Wiry vines embraced the four corners. Wind and weather scored its siding, and birds nested in available crannies. Every night, She swaddled the squat building in the same comfortable, benign gloom as the trees, with only the shuffles and cries of nocturnal creatures for company.

But on this night, a luminescence suddenly pierced that motherly dark with violent intrusion, transforming four-walled dilapidated inertness into something awake and unnatural once more. The small light blazed out far into the forest ahead, as if in search of admirers. And it happened that, around midnight, its glimmer found reflection in four sets of eyes - recognition in three.

A group of young men had been traveling down a nearby service road when they saw it. They walked the route frequently as a shortcut between their residential neighborhood and the city beyond. These men knew of the rotting old cabin, but typically ignored it. After all, the building was unoccupied and technically off-limits park property. A graveyard of broken bottles and crushed beer cans around its perimeter indicated that not all local youth showed it the same respect.

Candlelight came startingly into view as they rounded a sharp turn around the hillside. The first of the group, Mark, whom you could say was something like their leader, held up his hand for them to stop. “Wait,” he said. Each of them stopped in turn and stared, except one who was blind.

“What is it?” asked the blind friend, Sam.

“It looks like a candle burning in the window of the old cabin,” answered another of the group, Pete. He was the most intelligent among them but also the most easily frightened. The fourth man was the most foolhardy, a class clown type named Joe. Delighted and intrigued by this spooky appearance, Joe enthused, “we should go check it out!”

Thus, a debate among them ensued about whether to continue on their way or step off the path and into the woods to approach the cabin. Pete was dead set against it and fought bitterly with Joe. Mark considered thoughtfully and tried to mediate between them. Sam said very little, if anything.

At last, Joe tromped off stubbornly in the direction of the cabin, loudly jeering and goading his friends to follow. The rest felt compelled to chase after him, if only to not be separated at night and so far from the comfort of well-lit streets.

An icy fear gripped Pete, but he offered his blind companion his shoulder to hold onto as they made their way through the bed of dry leaves blanketing the forest floor. Just as the candle had disrupted the dark, the four young men’s crunching steps and conversation thrust a loud and unwelcome upset into otherwise eerie stillness.

Pete knew that if there was a candle in the window, then clearly someone had been in the cabin not so long ago and that they could still be there. Whoever they were, they did not belong here. And he had no wish to meet someone trespassing where no one ought to be, especially in the middle of the night.

Soon, they were close enough to see the candle clearly - a simple tall white wax cylinder and gently waving teardrop of fire suckling wick. Oddly, while the flame cast brightly on their faces and the ground below, it did not appear to illuminate inside the cabin. From their perspective, looking up at the window, the interior was still pitch dark.

“Well?” Sam interrupted their uneasy silence for an update, causing Pete to startle. “Well, it’s just a candle,” Mark chuckled, “probably just some practical joke.”

“We should head back,” said Pete, “it’s not safe if there is someone out here.” But Joe was already creeping up to the window and standing on tippy toe to look inside.

“Wait!” “No!” Pete and Mark warned him.

“Aw relax, I’m just looking,” he said to them, but soon frowned in disappointment. “Damn, can’t see anything!”

Sam released a slow breath. Though he could not see it, he sensed the soft cloud of condensation ahead of him. Everything was dark to him all the time, but he could almost "see" in the company of these three. They fed him information by the way they spoke, how they walked, and their auras - that intangible energy of mood and thought emanating from them that even blindness hadn’t robbed him of the ability to read.

Through them, he absorbed the scene. It was an awfully dark night and they stood in the gaze of an awfully bright candle. A normally comforting object made sinister by its uncanny inhabitance.

Sam may not have been the leader, the most intelligent, or the most outgoing among them, but he had strengths others did not. He was often composed and careful, compassionate and wise, and he was by far the most perceptive of the bunch.

“Come on, let’s go inside!” Joe egged them on, trotting up to the short stoop. “Whoever was here is long gone.”

“No, absolutely not!” Pete appealed to Mark. “Talk some sense into him?”

Mark said, “Listen, we got to see it, but we are trespassing still and…” He stopped, then diplomatically turned to Sam as he had yet to receive Sam’s input. “What do you think?”

Being the calmest by nature, Sam hadn’t experienced the same anxiety or excitement as the rest of them at the outset, but now he had begun to get a slimy feeling in his guts.

He felt as though they had already lingered too long in the candlelight and itched to be back in the relative safety of the shadows on the road. Why he felt that, he couldn’t say, since he technically should not have noticed a difference.

Sam chalked it up to the nerves of the others simply being infectious. Still, there was a real potential danger should they run into strangers in the middle of nowhere in the dark.

“I think Pete is right,” Sam said. “I think we’ve done enough.”

“There you have it!” Mark announced grandly, with finality, and with a hint of relief. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Aww!” Joe rolled his eyes but hopped off the stoop and they all turned around to walk back in the direction they had come.

Sam hadn’t gone two strides when he crashed into Pete’s back. “Ow! Hey! Why’d you stop?”

Sam put a hand on his friend’s shoulder to steady himself. He felt Pete suddenly tremble. All three of Sam’s friends went silent.

“Hey, you guys? What gives? Pete?”

“What the F- - -?” Joe’s voice.

“Th-… this can’t be right,” Pete stuttered.

“My God,” said Mark, sounding astonished.

“GUYS! WHAT IS IT?”

“We, we-, we’re not in the woods anymore,” said Pete finally.

“What do you mean?” asked Sam, taking a step to come around to Pete’s side.

That’s when he felt it. The odd flatness of the surface beneath his boots. He picked up his right foot and tapped his toe around. No leaves crunching or shuffling. Sliding the toe of his boot over the surface, he found that it was indeed mostly flat with a little bit of roughness - like an unpolished wood floor.

“What the? So, where are we then?”

“We’re in the cabin.” Mark’s voice was barely above a whisper.

What Sam couldn’t have known was that the moment they turned heel to depart from the cabin, with no discernible transition, the forest in front of them had disappeared, replaced by a wall of black that completely surrounded them. That was save for a window dead ahead with a tall white candle feeding a greedy little flame.

Sam didn’t know that although all his friends could see the candle ever brightly burning, they still could not see each other or make out any details of their surroundings. Not the floors, walls, ceilings, or anything else that could be in proximity. The darkness inside the cabin was all-consuming, bouncing back not a beam. The most they could see beyond the increasingly blinding torch of a candle was a glimpse of trees outside. A sliver of hope, of home - proof of some sanity outside of this sudden madness.

Sam couldn’t see that the gentle wave of the candle’s fire had grown erratic. It flickered wildly this way and that, blossoming larger and hotter, straining further from its wick, as if reacting to their presence. As if excited.

“Screw this, I’m out of here!” Joe bellowed and charged the door. A bang followed by frantic scuffling told Sam that he did not find the door immediately as expected. Soon the others were at the wall too, helping him search, Sam included. They ran their hands all over rotting wooden boards, but no other features could be felt.

Sam couldn’t have known for sure what happened next, but he could guess. He could guess that the new round of desperate shouts, cries, and anguished groans meant something else in the room had changed. The only thing that could frighten his friends more than being locked in a room with a single mysterious and threatening light source was if that light source vanished.

The candle had gone out. The view from the window erased with it. Sam couldn’t have seen but he could sense that his sighted companions had been plunged into a lightless world as deep and unyielding as his own. None of them could have known what happened next.