By the Light of His Lantern Read online

“You’re making this too easy,” Grant remarked.

  “I’m ready to be done with it.”

  Lewis made an effort to turn and raise his head from the table to watch them. There was another table, apparently, next to his, which they instructed Shaw to climb upon. He did without protest. He even went so far as to ask them how he should lay, belly up or belly down, and they told him belly up was fine and he obeyed.

  Eventually they were both tied to their respective tables. Lewis shook uncontrollably, like the table he lay upon were frozen steel. But really it was just nerves. He craned his head to the side to look at Shaw. He was a bit older than Lewis had imagined, only having heard his voice. He was naked and thin, lightly bearded, a sharp beak of a nose. His eyes were closed. He appeared restful, waiting for Karen and Grant to do what they would.

  Karen placed Lewis’s lantern on Shaw’s table while Grant brought a rolled up towel and placed it near his side. When he unrolled the towel, it was revealed to be a bundle of tools, or weapons, which Lewis quickly determined would be used to torture them.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake…” Lewis said under his breath.

  He turned away. He didn’t want to see. Feet shuffled between their tables. Tools rattled and clinked as they were set out and prepped. Grant and Karen muttered and whispered. If Lewis had wanted to, he could have heard perfectly clear what they said, but he didn’t. He wanted to pretend he was someplace else. He wanted to wake up finally, to realize this was the climax to his nightmare and that his mind had decided now was the time to end it, to bring him back to the real world where there was light, where the sun woke him in the morning and the moon seduced him into bed at night. He wanted—

  Something zipped, or unzipped—a quick, wet sound of flesh being unstitched—and suddenly Shaw wasn’t so apathetic anymore. The room filled with his screaming, and Lewis found it strangely difficult to resist opening his eyes and turning his head to see, to witness the horror his ears translated so terribly for his mind. There was another slice shortly after. Shaw continued screaming.

  “Lewis,” Karen said somewhere in the room. “Lewis.”

  Lewis opened his eyes. He looked around, turned his head toward the next table. He wished he hadn’t.

  “Do you see this?” Karen asked, standing on the other side of Shaw’s table, her smile warped across her face by the firelight. “Do you see him?”

  Shaw was opened up, and judging by the slow blink of his eyes he was still alive. Grant—with the grave expression of a focused surgeon—had hold of his intestines, wound them around his arm like a garden hose, pulling them out foot by foot from the opening they’d made in his belly. Karen gave a shriek-y guffaw, delighted by the horror she saw on Lewis’s face. And just like he figured she’d wanted, he nearly couldn’t tear his gaze away. Finally he did. He shut his eyes, promised himself he’d never open them again.

  “No big deal,” Karen said. “When it’s your turn, I’ll start with your eyelids. Then you’ll have to watch.”

  His heart beat so fast he thought he couldn’t take it much longer. A lightheaded buzz washed over him, a feeling like he could pass out. He wished he would.

  Over the next several minutes he listened as they tore more flesh, snapped bone, plucked insides out onto the floor around the table. They slithered and plopped and thumped as they reached their hands in and piled them up. He couldn’t see any of it, but the sounds were unmistakable.

  “Lewis! Catch!”

  Something wet and warm and gooey stuck to the side of his face and he began to scream. He bucked up and down on the table, whipped his head from side to the side in an attempt to get it off. Whatever it was fell away. If he turned his head just right, he could touch his ear on it. So he turned the other way, tilted his head. He took as deep a breath as he could, but it wasn’t enough to stop him trembling.

  Shaw was silent.

  Time stretched on. He listened as the gruesome process continued. Grant muttered under his breath, his breathing shaky and stressed, as the peeling of flesh continued. By the sounds of it, they were dismembering him now, breaking him apart limb by limb until he couldn’t have been much more than a stump on the table.

  Eyes still closed, jaw clenched under a migraine, Lewis said, “He’s dead already! Why are you still—”

  “This isn’t for him,” Karen answered. “This is for you!”

  Things started to quiet down eventually. It sounded as though they might have been cleaning up.

  “How long do you think this will get us?” Karen asked. “This has to be worth so much more than anything we’ve done yet.”

  “I don’t know,” Grant said. He sounded disinterested. “We’ll just have to find out, I guess.”

  “I bet it’s a long time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It should be! I can taste the suffering in here…”

  And they weren’t finished yet. Lewis opened his eyes again when he heard the metallic tools dumped next to him. Karen smiled down upon him with cheerful malice while Grant organized their things. He brought the lantern and sat it down on the table, illuminating Lewis’ pale naked body.

  “We’re gonna take our time with you,” Karen said.

  “None of this matters,” Lewis answered. He couldn’t hide the desperation in his voice. “It’s just superstition. You don’t know what really happens—”

  “We’ve done it before.” Her eyes were bold and piercing, humorless. “I think we know a thing or two more about it than you.”

  “There’s always something coming,” Grant said, his voice soft and faraway as he carefully lined the sharp utensils next to each other. “Always coming, and you never know when it’s here for you. But it gets you. One way or another.”

  “But we learned this trick,” Karen continued. “We give it what it wants before it can take it from us. And then it leaves us alone for a while. We don’t have to worry about the bumps in the night, or the whispers at the door. We have peace.”

  “Temporarily,” Grant said.

  Lewis put his head back, closed his eyes. It would be over one way or another. However long they managed to drag it out, it would end eventually and he’d be back on the beach in the sand. It didn’t sound like such a curse anymore, starting over. So long as the pain ended for a while…

  Lewis said something, very low to himself, barely more than a mumble.

  “What’s that, kid?” Karen asked. “You say something?”

  They paused to listen. Lewis opened his mouth, and his eyeballs rolled behind their lids as he swam through his thoughts, figuring something out in private, and both Karen and Grant found themselves oddly drawn in by his hesitation so that they waited with bated breath for him to repeat himself. When he spoke again, it was hardly louder than before, still speaking to himself, but they paid such close attention that they made it out.

  “… I should have done it. I thought about it. I should have just done it…”

  “What’re you sleep talking about?”

  “…I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be anywhere. I should have ended it…”

  Karen and Grant shared sideways glances.

  “A lot of people here probably wishing the same thing, kid.”

  Without warning, Lewis bucked on the table, pulled at his restraints, rolling his middle from side to side. Karen and Grant gasped, flinched away. The silver tools on the table jangled and rolled. The table squeaked. Grant put his hands down forcefully, peering down into Lewis’s strained face.

  “Knock it off.”

  He continued thrashing. Grant slammed his fists on the table on either side of Lewis’s ears and demanding he stop once more, but still he wouldn’t listen. One of the tools separated from the others and rolled toward the edge of the table. Karen grabbed it, and then put her hand over the rest to steady them.

  “If you don’t quit that, I’m gonna get started a lot more aggressively than you’ll like!” she threatened.

  The jar lantern turned on its side and rolled
in an arc, paused dangerously near the table’s edge, and then fell. Its glass made a sparkly thud on the wood floor below. Lewis stopped. He lifted his head. Karen bent down and picked the jar up.

  “Noticed that, didn’t you,” Grant said. Then he spoke to Karen. “The fire. Toss it outside.”

  “What? We could use this here, though…”

  “Toss it outside, I said!”

  Karen looked between Lewis and Grant. She held the lantern up in front of her face longingly.

  “He won’t be able to watch if we throw it out.”

  “That’s fine,” Grant said. He bent over Lewis again, looked him in the eye. “I think he’ll wish we hadn’t once he realizes how much worse it can be in the dark.”

  That playful grin found Karen’s mouth again. She took the lantern away, its light creating just a small glow around her as she cut through the black of the room to the front door, which she opened and, without further hesitation, swung the lantern by its handle out into the night.

  “No!” Lewis screamed. “Fuck you!”

  “No, fuck you,” Grant whispered, their eyes inches apart though they could no longer see each other. “You’ve got much more yet to lose than your little fire.”

  The front door slammed shut and Karen returned to the table. The metallic utensils clinked and shuffled from hand to hand between them both. Their feet scuffed the wood floor as they circled him.

  “Our cuts won’t be as deliberate now, which is in all honesty a little more exciting, I think.”

  Lewis couldn’t speak. He couldn’t scream, or cry, or curse at them. He lay his head back and stared up at nothing, listened to the sounds of his murderers at his side contemplate how they’d begin. They were creative souls, Karen and Grant. Nothing straightforward. Each of their victims, Lewis imagined, was an experiment, perfecting their rituals. They were probably pretty good at it by now. He’d listened as they practiced on Shaw. Even someone as apathetic about death as him hadn’t been able to stifle their screams. They were teachers, in a way. They taught suffering and misery, like most would never get to experience in the real world.

  Lewis figured he was about to learn quite a lot.

  He shrieked as something pricked the underside of his foot.

  “Ticklish, are we?”

  This time, by the tip of a very thin blade—something like a scalpel—they drew an opening from the fleshy ball of his heel, along the delicate arch in between, to the pad beneath his toes. He felt the wound, could see it in his mind’s eye before him like a hot silver thread imbedded in his flesh, and from it he felt a trickle of wet blood gather at the back of his heel on the table.

  “Hold very still,” Grant advised, “or you’re apt to hurt yourself worse than I intend at the moment.”

  A hand cupped the side of his head, warm over his ear, and he felt a cold point settle on his forehead just above his eyebrow. Instinctively he jerked his head away.

  “Now, now,” Grant said, a tone of comfort through his words. “That’s just what I’m talking about.”

  The hand on the side of his head corrected his position until he was facing the ceiling again. That cold point touched him, just above his eyebrow. It pressed a little harder than before.

  “You’re going to want to flinch when I do this, but remember… it’s only your forehead. It could be your eye.”

  Lewis gritted his teeth. His chest swelled with an intake of breath. Every second he waited for the pain to come, for the skin to tear and the meat underneath to split apart, felt like an entire minute more. He thought it must have been part of the torture, the anticipation, making him wait. He cringed, his muscles flexed from head to toe. Then, just when he thought he couldn’t brace himself any harder…

  There was a thud at the front door. Everything stopped.

  “Did you hear that?” Karen asked.

  After a pause: “I did.”

  “Was it the wind?”

  “I don’t think it was the wind, no.”

  “Is there someone out there, you think?”

  Grant sighed. “I don’t know, Karen. I’m not fucking omnipotent.”

  “Omniscient.”

  “You know what the fuck I mean.”

  Lewis let out his breath very slowly, fearing a heavy sigh would remind them he was there, waiting. They were distracted for now. He was too, for the most part. He’d heard the thud as well and he had to agree. It was not the wind.

  “Should we check?”

  “I’ll check,” Grant said.

  He moved away, fingers whispering along the edge of the table which he used to guide himself. When he reached the door, he stopped and listened. Lewis lifted his head in his direction, eyes peeled wide for no reason. Then Grant opened the door. There was a light there, low and dim on the porch—a soft, licking flame in a glass jar.

  “Huh?” Karen’s voice startled Lewis, having forgotten she was standing just beside him. “What is it?”

  Grant didn’t say anything. Not at first.

  “There’s someone out there,” he whispered. “I think they mean to fool with us.”

  “Shut the door, then,” Karen said. “Bring that in, though, before you do.”

  Grant bent and took the jar lantern up. Lewis felt immense relief to see it again. He’d feared it might have broken or extinguished somehow when Karen had thrown it out. But it looked fine there in Grant’s grip, smudged with dirt and blood and all. Grant shut the door and locked it. He set the lantern on Shaw’s table this time.

  “What good was doing that, do you think?” Karen asked. She spoke quickly, a whine in her voice. “What would they do that for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They still out there, you think?”

  “Of course they’re still out there. They didn’t bring that back to be nice. They’re playing with us. I doubt they’re done already.”

  They watched the door together. Lewis watched them watch the door. Their lust for inflicting pain had gone flaccid, apparently.

  “What do we do now?” Karen asked. She looked down at Lewis. Their eyes met, though she didn’t really see him. “The mood is ruined.”

  “It’s not ruined. We’ll keep going. If it happens again—”

  And it happened again. Another knock on the door, three of them total. Not a thud like last time, but gentle.

  “Don’t answer it,” Karen said.

  “Of course I’m not going to answer it.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Let me think.”

  He thought for a long time.

  “Are you going to do something or not?”

  “If you’re so worried, go do something stupid yourself, then. Get us both reset.”

  “We can’t just stand here all night. They might never leave us alone. And we’ve got him…”

  “He’s not going anywhere.”

  Grant took the lantern and made his way across the room toward the door. Instead of going to the door, however, he went to the window beside it. Lewis felt a pang of surprise then, for some reason. The thought that there were windows all along, them surrounded by dark while anything else might be looking in…

  “You’re not going to see anything out there that way,” Karen said. “Not unless you mean to get a good look at yourself.”

  And that’s all Grant was given—his reflection. He grimaced—a look caught between anger and embarrassment—and went to the door instead. He put his ear to it and listened.

  “What is it? Do you hear anything?”

  They all cried out at the shattering of glass. It sprayed the floor beneath the next table, and something heavy rolled with it. After a brief instant of shock, Grant moved to them, between the tables, and picked up whatever it was. When he stood he held a round smooth rock in his hand. He squeezed it, his knuckles almost as white as his face.

  “I’m going out there,” Grant said, jaw clenched.

  “You can’t. We don’t know how many there are.”

  “We ca
n’t just let them destroy our house.”

  “It’s not our house…”

  Ignoring her, Grant took one of their sharpest blades and moved back to the door, lantern at his side.

  “Stay here in case they try to get in.”

  He opened the door a crack. He listened some more. Then he opened it wide—stood tall, chest puffed, hiding the fear Lewis had seen with his own eyes only moments earlier. Karen left to stand behind Grant at the door, looking over his shoulder at the nothing on their porch.

  “Close the door behind me.”

  He stepped outside and Karen did just as he said. She went to the window—her footsteps swept carefully through the broken glass—and stopped, watching the lantern in Grant’s hand bob into the yard..

  There was another thud. It came from the opposite end of the house, from the holding room. Karen looked over her shoulder in its direction.

  “I think I heard something in here,” she said to Grant through the now open window. Grant said something in response, though Lewis couldn’t hear what exactly.

  Karen crept back through the tinkling glass. She shuffled toward the next room, and everything was quiet.

  “Hello?” she said. The apprehension in her voice was a far cry from the glee she’d expressed only minutes ago during their torture. Still tied up and terrified as he was, Lewis couldn’t help feeling satisfaction by it. Hopeful. “Hello?”

  Something shifted in the back room, like something falling over, or being nudged as a hidden presence bumped clumsily into it. It didn’t make sense, of course. Lewis and Shaw had been in there together and heard nothing. Lewis had sensed nothing, either, for whatever that was worth. They’d been alone in there. But someone, or something, was in there now. Karen darted from the door. Her feet hurried to Lewis on his table, and he felt her hands pat over his naked body in search of one of the many utensils scattered there. She grabbed something.

  “Come out of there,” she said in the dark. “I know you’re in there.”

  Grant, meanwhile, was still absent. Either he hadn’t found anything yet to report, or maybe…

  “How did they get inside…” Karen muttered to herself. “There’s no way they could have… there’s no way…”