Within the Woods

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Its constant, unmoving flame went unnoticed for days. The worn gray timbers of the cabin groaned painfully, deep within the withered fingers of the forest.

“I just knew something was out there,” the sheriff said when later questioned. “Storms had been raging for days. Wind, rain, snow, sometimes hail. I don’t really know… but I just knew. So I went looking. Looking for whatever was in those woods.”

The storm ceased when the sheriff laid eyes on the bright red flame and the damnable column of wax beneath it. If, indeed, it was wax. The scientists who later came to examine it were unable to determine its exact composition. Three had to be detained after studying a sample. The fourth remembered nothing of it after emerging from her coma. None could determine how the candle burned without growing shorter. And yet, the wax continued to pool and bead beneath the flame, crawling further and further from the base in striated ridges of dull, waxy slag. Soon enough, the red molten wax covered half of the old cabin’s single room like a scalding pool of blood. Stranger still, the candle bore no wick, and the unmoving flame never shuddered or gave hints of extinguishing. Wind did not make it flicker. Water turned to steam. One of the scientists, before they could detain him, discovered that it melted human flesh and charred bone at a concerning speed. His lost hand was evidence enough of the phenomenon.

We simply have no answers, a report to the military would later read. The man who wrote it was dishonorably discharged shortly thereafter and felt a wave of relief when he received the news. He nearly managed to leave the state in time. They found his mangled corpse in a glen of silent, watching trees near a rest stop on the border.

At the peak of the candle’s study, a small fortress was built around the ramshackle wooden dwelling. The experts on the scene attempted relocating the candle, but it remained anchored, whether by the massive amounts of wax connecting it to the cabin or by some other force. Steel scaffolding, cameras, all manner of sensors and measuring instruments were erected around it. A man-made shell to shield and study something men could not comprehend. Those who had dealt with the candle the longest, the sheriff and other local liaisons, recommended against this. Well they remembered how the study of this object had gone before. But the logical leaps these better-funded newcomers were willing to make easily surpassed any argument more seasoned souls could construct. Surely, the breakdowns and catatonic states of those who had studied the wax were due to the stressful environment in which the study took place. Their shoddier instruments and smaller budget likewise made for fewer safety precautions. The scientists that came before must not have used safe enough methods in their zeal to uncover some great discovery.

The newcomers were so confident of this right until their end. How their doom arrived is not known. None of their gadgets, sensors, or cameras functioned after they were found, and not a soul lived to give an account. The sheriff came to the fortress at the request of the chief of staff stationed there and arrived to discover it reduced to rubble. The shell of study became a grove of unmarked graves filled with unrecognizable corpses, overseen by the baleful glow of the candlelight.

After that day, the sheriff ensured the woods were left alone. The cabin still stands to this day, with that bloody flame glowing in its one window, its molten wax extending into the surrounding forest. The sheriff, now old, gray, and retired, still goes to check on it each day. With so many years passed, those who know of the candle act as though it will never go out. The sheriff, however, dreams of such a day and fears. Then will come the creature that lit the invisible wick and so will return the storms that heralded its first coming. The thing’s name is unknowable and the force of its arrival as steady and constant as the hateful flame.