So Shines a Good Deed in a Naughty World

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. The pale flame stood sentry against the open dark, and lifted curling smoke like prayers towards the ceiling. Across the cabin walls, shadows writhed.

Inside the cabin, an old woman sat at a table, feverishly eating fresh meat on a bone. Blood dribbled down her chin, and sinews squeaked and squelched in her pulling jaws. The sound startled her and she stopped chewing, searching the room with quick, yellow eyes.

Silence. Nothing moving but the candle’s flame.

She swallowed.

The boy had howled when she had grabbed him, and he had kicked and fought as well. A purple bruise was rising under the green skin of her forearm, and her hand wore a telling arc of red where he had bitten her. She smirked, thinking how she had paid him back in kind.

She was sure some of the townspeople had followed her at least partway through the woods. There had been a wail – the mother? – and a “please!” but it was stillness now. They might still be coming. They could find the cabin.

“Let them find me” she thought, “there are bigger threats coming”.

She had found the cabin abandoned and stopped there. The boy was so fat it had been difficult to find the spot to insert the knife among the rings on his neck. It was difficult, but she had needed a big one.

Refusing to accept the inevitable, the little fool had thrashed about, spraying the cobwebs and the walls. Finally he slowed and, in those final throes, with pink bubbles rising and fading on the boy’s lips, the woman began her work. She grabbed a handful of the boy’s hair and cut it away, muttering an incantation in a language lost to time. She placed the hair aside and hung the body by the feet from the rafters. Though her stomach growled, she needed to wait. She would not survive unless she was patient.

It had been two nights since she first sensed the dread in the dark. There was a change in the wind, salt in the air. Some ancient and evil alchemy had frozen fear in crystals and cast it on the breeze. She had been warned by her mother to watch for these signs and had learned how to protect herself.

The first time, the child was too small – a baby really – and the candle had not lasted through the night. She was in a cave that time and had quivered watching the candle sputter and wane. It was just before dawn when the candle finally expired and she heard the slow scrape of claws on the cave walls. She felt the musty air change and warm breath on her cold cheek. It was in her air, filling her lungs. But a single spot of sunlight had saved her and the dread had vanished in an angry howl. That sound bounced through the cave, and echoed still through her mind. All the sorrow of Hell was in that shriek. She could not stand to hear it again.

When her mother had taught her, she had asked why it had to be a child.

“Innocence is bright light, sin brings the dark” her mother had said. “Hell has not seen purity burning and is frightened of it”.

Now, the dread was coming and would find her on the next moonless night. She would do what needed to be done.

Hunger pulled at her insides and she needed her strength to make the candle. She sustained herself for days by lapping like a dog at the dark red pool gathering on the floor. When the time came, her knife moved expertly. She separated the fat and tossed it into a pot. She placed the pot over a fire and sat by it, watching the fat begin to render and bubble.

She began binding together the boy’s hair and dipped the plaited cord into the bubbling tallow. She turned the new wick in her hands and looked at it in the light of the fire. She could not deny the frisson this power gave her. To hold in her hand a soul, an unpolluted one at that, and know that she would be putting it to flame. It gave her strength in her fear.

She poured out the tallow to set, and placed the wick inside the new candle. It was ready to burn. She hoped the boy had been kind. If he had been wicked, the soul might not burn bright enough.

Night began to fall, this time without a moon rising. She sensed again the change in the air.

She lit the candle and placed it in the window. The flame squirmed on the wick and stayed ablaze. She moved away from the window, remembering the breath that filled her and the howl that still reverberated in her mind. She would eat and move again in the daylight. She had to find another child and start the ritual again. Anything to avoid that fear.

In the window, the candle flickered, casting its light into the darkness like a silent scream.