NOBODY LIVES ON LANTERN HILL
The town says the house is empty. The lights disagree.
Elias had always known about the house on Lantern Hill. Every child in Blackwater Creek did. It stood at the end of the winding dirt road, a skeletal silhouette against the bruised purple sky of perpetual twilight. The locals called it the Bone House, not out of malice, but from a deep-seated respect for the dead that had settled over the town like dust. They said old Man Croft had died there fifty years ago, and his spirit was so tied to the land that he never left. The house had been empty since. Or so they claimed. Elias knew better. He'd seen the lights. Flickering, warm yellow squares in the upper windows, like candles in the dark. His grandmother had slapped his wrist when he pointed them out once, her eyes wide with fear. "Don't you speak of such things, boy. Some doors are best left unopened." But Elias was nineteen now, and the weight of his grandmother's warnings had grown lighter with each passing year. Tonight, the lights burned brighter than ever, a silent invitation that hummed in his blood.
The air in Blackwater Creek tasted of damp earth and something else—something metallic and old, like blood rusted in the soil. Elias walked the familiar path, his boots crunching on fallen leaves that had been there since before he was born. The town was small, a cluster of houses huddled together for warmth against the encroaching woods. But the woods were where the real life was, in Elias's opinion. They held secrets the town's gossips couldn't whisper. He wasn't looking for trouble, not exactly. He was looking for answers. His father had disappeared ten years ago, last seen heading toward Lantern Hill with a flashlight and a crowbar, muttering about "settling things once and for all." His body had never been found. Some said the woods had swallowed him whole. Elias had his own theory, one that grew more certain every time he saw those lights in the abandoned house. His father was in there. Or whatever was left of him.
The closer Elias got to the Bone House, the thicker the silence became. The usual nocturnal symphony of crickets and owls fell away, replaced by a vacuum of sound that pressed against his eardrums. The house loomed before him, a three-story Victorian monstrosity with peeling paint and sagging porches. The light from the upper windows spilled onto the overgrown lawn, casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to writhe independently of their sources. It was impossible. The electricity had been cut off decades ago. There was no generator. The house was, by all accounts, a shell. Yet the light was real. It painted the gnarled branches of the dead oak tree in the yard with an ethereal glow, making them look like the grasping fingers of a buried giant. Elias felt a primal tug, a need to go inside, to confront the source of the impossible glow. It was the same pull that had guided his father to his doom.
He pushed open the sagging gate, its rusty hinges screaming in the quiet night. The sound was deafening in the stillness. Every instinct screamed at him to turn back, to run back to the safety of the town lights and forget the whole thing. But his father's face, a memory both loving and terrifying, flashed in his mind. Elias took the first step onto the overgrown path, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The front door was ajar, a dark maw in the illuminated facade. As he approached, he could feel it—the cold. It wasn't just the chill of the night air. It was a deep, unnatural cold that seemed to emanate from the house itself, a cold that promised answers and damnation in equal measure. He reached out a trembling hand, his fingers brushing against the rough wood of the door. The cold seeped into his bones, and from within the darkness of the hallway, a figure began to coalesce, its face a void of shadow and malice.