Campfire Tales

The road was a scar of mud and misery etched between skeletal trees. For Elias, it was the final stretch of a life that had unraveled thread by painful thread. His farm was gone, swallowed by dust and debt. His family, by grief. All that remained was the hollow ache in his chest and the biting autumn wind that promised a merciless night. He was walking toward nothing, a ghost before his time, when a flicker of light bobbed in the oppressive dark ahead.

It was a lantern, its glow sickly and amber, held by a silhouette leaning against a crooked mile marker. As Elias drew closer, the man’s features sharpened—a sly, angular face and eyes that held the cold amusement of a predator.

“A hard road for a soul so weary,” the man said, his voice a silken rasp. He held the lantern forward. It was fashioned from a gnarled, blackened turnip, a single, malevolent coal burning within. “Lost your way?”

“I have no way left to lose,” Elias rasped, his throat raw.

The man chuckled, a dry, rustling sound like dead leaves skittering across a grave. “Everyone has something left. Hope. Fear. A last, desperate bargain.” He extended the lantern. “I am… tired. Tired of this endless wandering. Take my light. In its glow, you will find all you have lost. A small favor is all I ask in return.”

Desperation is a potent poison. It quiets the soul’s warnings and makes a fool of reason. Elias saw not the sinister glint in the stranger’s eyes, but a sliver of impossible hope. “What favor?”

“Just carry it,” the stranger whispered, pressing the surprisingly light lantern into Elias’s hand. “Let it guide you. They call me Jack.” And then, like smoke on the wind, he was gone. Elias was alone again, but now he held the light. It pulsed with a faint, almost living warmth against his skin.

He walked on, the lantern’s glow pushing back the shadows, until he stumbled into a village huddled in a valley like a frightened animal. He saw the name on a faded sign: Havenwood. It was a lie. The fields were blighted, the houses hunched and dark. A palpable gloom hung in the air, heavier than the coming frost.

A door creaked open, and the town’s preacher, a gaunt man named Alistair, offered him a place in the church for the night. As Elias stepped inside, the lantern flared. In the sudden, brilliant light, the sanctuary twisted. For a sickening second, Elias saw not pews and an altar, but rows of weeping figures shackled to their seats. On the pulpit, Alistair’s shadow stretched into a grotesque, horned beast, its mouth open in a silent, damning sermon. Elias blinked, and the vision was gone. He was left trembling, the image burned behind his eyes.

That night, the stranger’s whisper slithered into his thoughts. He hides a sin, this holy man—a stolen life buried beneath the church floor. The lantern knows. The lantern sees.

The next day, Havenwood began to unravel. Haunted by the vision, Elias kept the lantern close. Its light, once a comfort, was now a curse. When he passed the kindly old woman, Elara, who offered him a piece of bread, the lantern pulsed. He saw her shadow writhe, her hands stained with a darkness that was not dirt. He saw a vision of her as a young woman, pushing her own sister from a cliff’s edge.

She coveted her sister’s husband. Jack’s voice hissed in his mind—a secret she has carried for fifty years. The light feeds on such things.

The coal within the turnip burned brighter.

Elias tried to ignore it, but Jack’s whispers were constant, insidious. He pointed out the mayor’s shadow, a gluttonous creature gorging on the town’s stolen grain. He showed him the blacksmith, whose shadow cowered, forever reliving the moment he let a child drown. Every soul in Havenwood harbored a secret ugliness, a festering wound of guilt or malice.

Paranoia took root like a noxious weed. The lantern’s glow seemed to cast suspicion on everything. Neighbors who had lived side-by-side for decades began watching each other from behind drawn curtains. An argument over a property line escalated into a bloody brawl. Alistair, the preacher, began delivering sermons of fire and damnation, his eyes wild, accusing his flock of sins he couldn’t possibly know, yet described with chilling accuracy.

Elias realized the truth. The lantern wasn’t just showing him their sins; it was projecting them. The villagers saw their own deepest fears and failings reflected in the faces of their neighbors. Jack’s whispers were not just for him. The seeds of doubt were being planted in every heart in Havenwood.

“They are turning,” Jack cackled in his ear, a sound of pure, cruel delight. “See how thin the veil of civility is? How quickly they become the monsters they always were inside?”

The lantern was now a blazing beacon. The coal inside burned with the heat of a thousand stolen secrets. Grotesque shadows danced on the walls of the houses, mocking caricatures of the people within. Havenwood was consuming itself. The villagers, seeing Elias always with the cursed light, began to blame him. They called him a witch, a devil-sent curse. He was the source of their misery.

One night, they came for him. A mob, their faces twisted with hate, armed with pitchforks and torches that seemed pathetic next to the lantern's supernatural glare. Alistair was at their head. “The demon and his unholy light must be purged!” he screamed.

Elias fled, the whispers of Jack roaring in his mind. They will tear you apart. They see only the monster you carry. But you can stop them. You have the power.

He found himself backed against the old, dead oak at the center of the village square. As Alistair lunged, the lantern flared with blinding intensity. In the incandescent blast, every secret was laid bare. The crowd saw Alistair not as a preacher, but a murderer standing over a shallow grave. They saw Elara’s hands dripping with her sister’s blood. They saw the blacksmith’s cowardice, the mayor’s greed—every lie, every betrayal that had poisoned their souls.

They stopped seeing Elias. They saw only each other.

A scream tore from Elara’s throat as she pointed at the blacksmith. He, in turn, shrank from the mayor’s accusing gaze. Chaos erupted. It was a frenzy of violence, neighbor turning on neighbor, friend on friend, each trying to extinguish the reflection of their own darkness in the eyes of another.

Elias stood in the eye of the storm, horrified. The lantern throbbed with ecstatic power, growing hotter with every soul that fell. This was Jack’s harvest.

Through the din, Jack’s voice spoke, calm and final. “Their souls are mine now. They feed the flame.” The stranger appeared before him, stepping out of the shadows. He gestured to the burning village, the dying screams. “This is the favor. A feast of despair.”

He held out his hand. “Your part is done. You can go free. But the lantern needs a keeper. If you leave it, the flame will consume this place, and the next, until the world is ash. Or,” Jack’s lips curved into a final, terrible smile, “you can take my place. Wander the lonely roads, offer the bargain, and watch the world burn one soul at a time. The choice is yours, keeper.”

Elias looked at the carnage, at the firelight dancing on the faces of the dead. He looked at the lantern, its malevolent glow now a part of him. To abandon it was to doom countless others. To take it was to become a monster, an eternal agent of misery. He thought of the lonely road, the desperation that had led him here. Jack had not created the evil in Havenwood; he had merely illuminated it.

Slowly, Elias raised his gaze to meet Jack’s. He saw not a man, but an endless, hollow void. He clutched the lantern tighter, its heat searing his palm. And as the last screams of Havenwood faded, he took his first step onto the road, the lantern’s glow casting his long, solitary shadow far, far ahead.