A Lantern in the Dark

A short story by Nick Patrick Hickman

Louisa has been visited by the same bad dream since her sister’s husband went missing. It comes irregularly, but when it does—like tonight—it wakes her.

The windows of her sister Eleanor’s guestroom are curtainless and stark. Unhindered

moonlight casts a ghostly white rug across the bare floorboards. Louisa and Eleanor shared this room when they were young girls, years before their father passed and left the house to Eleanor and her husband, Silas. These windows used to have curtains. Louisa remembers them with curtains. In nights of lying here and wishing desperately for sleep, she often wonders what this room might look like if another generation of children occupied it.

She turns in bed and reaches across the nightstand for a cup of water but finds it first with her elbow and sends it top-over onto the floor, where there’s a clang followed by a rumbling thunder as it rolls across the floorboards. Louisa holds her breath. She listens for Eleanor’s movement in the bedroom on the other side of the wall.

After a count of ten breaths, then another count of five, Louisa rises and draws her gown around her. She creeps down the hall, past the bedroom that was once her father’s, where Eleanor now sleeps alone. Louisa knows which floorboards to avoid with the weight of a bare foot at night.

It was not Eleanor who asked for her. Louisa, in the rocking chair on her porch, was

restitching a tear in her daughter’s winter coat when there arrived a carriage driven by Mr.

Vestumble, Eleanor’s nearest neighbor, who had known their father. Mr. Vestumble had, three

days before, gone to the home of Silas and Eleanor seeking an extra hand with one of his stock, a mother cow who had been in labor for nine hours, and found only Eleanor. She would not speak.

Melancholy.

Grief-stricken.

Worn mute with heartache.

These the words of appraisal from the sheriff, provided by request to Mr. Vestumble, who had then come to tell Louisa. He had alighted from his carriage and removed his hat, climbed the stairs of the porch to speak to her. Looks awful like Silas just up and left town, Mr. Vestumble told her. You ought to go see her. No, he couldn’t reckon what possessed Silas to do it. Eleanor hadn’t borne him any children. Whether Silas left for that reason or another, it was just her alone in that house.

Louisa wanted to hit him for his candor on her own porch.

Eleanor had hugged Louisa when she arrived. And Louisa swore she’d seen, too, the

somber upturn of Eleanor’s lips—something meant to resemble a smile. Eleanor did in fact

speak, though minimally and never about Silas. It’s been three weeks gone, since then. Eleanor’s way of mourning is concerning. She is a pasture stripped bare without even wind to stir movement across its expanse. Surely even ceaseless weeping would be more assuring.

In the dream that has started only since Louisa has been here in her sister’s house, she is

trying to strike the light to a lantern. Furiously she strikes and strikes the match, but a flame

never comes. She is breathless. There is a horrifying urgency to bringing light into the

surrounding black that is somehow solid and fundamental and firm. She’s standing on this

blackness, and in it, and cannot get the flame—

Then something grabs her shoulder. That’s when she wakes.

As if acting in reprisal, Louisa strikes a match to light the lantern on the kitchen table. The flame comes at once. The orange shimmer winks off the pans hanging above the stove. She wants to write home to her husband and it’s best to do so discreetly, while Eleanor sleeps. Louisa doesn’t want her sister to think she’s eager to leave, but she’s intent to return home before the first snowfall. It’s three days by carriage. He can send their son Thomas, who is old enough to remember this house, he’s been here as a boy, before Louisa’s father passed. The flame sputters and pops. Then it goes out.

The lantern is out of oil.

Louisa steps into a spare pair of boots whose vacancy has rendered the leather soles cold and stiff beneath her feet. Quietly she opens the front door to go out to the shed for more kerosene. Stars spatter the sky and moonlight lays evenly across the dark soil. The ground is worn from the footfall of four generations passing between house and shed. Inside the shed, she’s embraced by thick, pervasive darkness smelling of old wood and peppermint to keep out the mice. Louisa can vaguely make out, on the second shelf, a small stack of tin canisters of kerosene. There’s an amorphous accumulation of clutter between the shelves and floor making the space feel tight. Her father had kept it better organized. Here among the kerosene canisters is the incongruous outline of an oil can with a worn label. It does not belong here.

Louisa lifts it and finds it empty but for a loose clatter from the inside.

She tips the can into her palm—a pocket watch. And what feels like a small leather coin

purse. Louisa strikes a match and holds it to the wick of her lantern for a better look, but it won’t catch—of course, because she came to fetch more oil. She pushes through the shed door and can see here, in the bright of the moon, that what she’s holding is Silas’s pocket watch and coin purse.

The ambient, lunar glow meets with an orange blare down the path, towards the house,

where Eleanor stands with a lantern. She’s staring at the watch in Louisa’s hand. “You weren’t supposed to find that.”

END