Hither ‘ere Lanterns

The midnight sky was flooded in a glare. It was an aurora borealis of clementine orange. Joshua looked up from his truck out on to the dead road. His eyes locked on the anomaly.  His wheel locks, and with it the tires skidded the truck into a tree. He slumped at the wheel, mustering his energy to look above as the light consumed the sky. The orange glow sank into his eyes.  It was all he could see.  He looked down at his chest where he felt an acute pain.  A branch had torn through his clothes and rested comfortably beside his lungs, protruding like a welcomed hand to the buzzards. He wondered if they would use it as perch whilst they gnawed away at him, a buffet parchment for a carcass.

‘Get up.’  Joshua uttered, defiant.  He looked down at his body. It was fat with age.  Sweat was pouring from his brow.  His rough hands grappled the branch as he tried to pull it loose.  The more he twisted and toyed with it the more he screamed, the agony of the splintering bark against the insides of his chest was intense. He reached towards the passenger seat. A small tool kit was still imbedded in-between the cushions. He pulled out a pair of pliers and made way at the branch. Hacking, clumsily, desperately until at last, the bark snapped. 

Clambering towards the drivers door he opened it wide as smoke fumed from the trucks engine, he collapsed on to the mud falling out onto the empty fields doggedly avoiding the engulfing truck.  His white woollen jumper picked up the wet dirt underneath him and the dirty fumes filled the air. His blood was dark, moist, and crusted on his jumper, the more it appeared the colder he felt.  ‘Walk it off.’  He muttered.  His boots trenched the earth beneath him as he found his feet once more, his head dizzying as he struggled towards the trees.   The dry stoned walls beside him were put together in a lost art form. There was no concrete between them, just an understanding that the stones would stay put. A lot like him, he thought.

As he stretched his neck back to look upon the bleeding light and a sting jabbed into his ears.  The noise was a dagger.  It was a tone, one that would not quit.  He looked away from the light and the noise went.  When he looked up the noise came back. Away again, and it left.  He kept his head straight, sheltering his eyes from the light.  From the excruciating noise it emitted.  ‘Right.’ He said to himself, suddenly, firmly.  A mantra that helped keep his focus. ‘Right.’  His path muddied in the midnight hour.  The fields were uncanny and increasingly unfamiliar.  The smoke from his crashed truck still bellowed.  He would use it as a way back.  But it was doubtful that he would be lost.  However, it gave him a sense of pleasure knowing that he thinks about such things.  After all, why use breadcrumbs when there’s a fume of smoke.

Joshua released his hand away from his brow to see if the flooding light was still there, but there was nothing.  The light had gone and he had managed to stray off his path.  ‘You idiot.’ He said, loudly, with a gust of air forming in the cold night, vanishing before him as if the words were never there.    He looked back, the fume of smoke was nowhere. And there was nowhere to go but between the woodlands and dirt.  He leaned on the tree and looked upon his wound, the branch protruding through, with blood scabbed and flaking. He looked out into the woods.  He was lost.

He slumped to the side of a beech tree, pulling up the mud from the ground with the disintegrating leaves and rubbing it on his wound, that had lumped and made home on his chest. He hoped the mud would stop the bleeding. Now he knew the damn thing would needed pulling out. He grabbed the core of the branch between his fingers and pulled.  But there was something wrong.  The more he pulled the more the branch felt tighter.  Pain was going through the back of his ribs, as he pulled his around Joshua could tell the branch had started to take root, pulling itself into his spine, surrounding his body, planting itself inside his very core. 

He fell to his knees in pain, in dirt, and in blood as his tears filled the ground. The agony coursing through his body left him no other choice than to pull the branch out.  He squeezed his skin pushing out the wood and bark like an overfilled blackhead.  Splinters cracked and tore apart his skin, but with every push the branch emptied out of his body.  As he squeezed out the last drop he saw the puddle of watery bark on the dirt floor of the woods. 

The bits of bark splintered, animating.  Becoming anthropomorphic in the pool of dirt. Suddenly he was confronted with an army of small tree creatures. They picked up small shards that poked from the ground and took aim at him. He brushed them away with his arm, their small shards ripping into his flesh.  His screams echoed through the woods.  With his bloodied arm he swiped them away, throwing the small bodies into the black void between the trees. The remaining bits of their bodies flung back at them like a kamikazied plane.

‘What in the devil?’ Joshua said, just as he caught his breath. He slumped down against a tree.  As he did do the weight of his body sent a cluster of fallen leaves over him.  A warm sensation took hold that turned into suffocation. He felt his lungs collapsing.   Was it the branch? He thought.  It did weed its way into his body tangling to his skeleton.  He felt it.  It was supernatural yes, but it was real.  But perhaps it was not the branch at all. No, that felt as though his bones were wooden, as if his skin was reaching into the core of the earth, growing ever colder. 

This was different. This felt more like something was attacking him from the outside, somehow turning his blood red hot.  It was as if he was a kettle he thought, someone was trying to tease it all out of him.  The pain was shooting all over his body. Joshua looked and he could see what it was.  It was the leaves.  They had grown teeth. They were malice and malign.  Chewing on him like leeches.  Dozens of them covering him head to toe gnawing through his clothes biting tender flesh away from every part of his body.  Freeing his blood back into the earth upon once it came.  He looked down on his body. It was bloodied, tired. He looked around, gasping, close to death.  He was wanting help but all he could see was the peaceful surroundings and an eerie quiet.   A soft gust of wind brushed against him, shushing him from his worry.  Sending him to a deep sleep.

There was a flicker from the darkness, then a second, and then another.  The lights filtered in and out.   There was a fire and inside was a grimace with hallow eyes and a welcoming hither.   The sinister lanterns of turnips and pumpkins surrounded him. He looked closely at the lanterns as his blood rushed back inside him.  His eyes squinted and unable to see clearly but the faces in the lanterns looked.  He tried to look closely. Waking up. Yes, he could see the eyes, they were black, crooked in shape and sinister in their feel.   They warmed the cheeks of his face as he approached them.  Whatever these creatures were they were giving him a second life. He reached out.  His fingers crossed the hollow air to touch one of the crooked lanterns. As his fingers twirled it sprung back as if on a string. It bobbed playfully up and down a pathway through into the woods. With a newfound breath of life he got to his feet as he was compelled to follow.

There was one lantern then that became three, then the three became ten and son on, multiplying further more as his path was like a pathway lifted from a dream.  The woods illuminated with turnip and pumpkin lanterns hanging from branches and floating in air.  The trees, and possessed plants life quivered away from the illumination, as if fear of smouldering or death.  Joshua was royalty as he crossed the golden lights.

He had been walking with the lanterns for what felt like hours. He was sure these fire sprites inside these floating turnips and pumpkins were speaking, it was elfish, obscure, and twittering. There were moments he thought they were laughing at him.  There was an inclination of mockery, like school children amused by a man they don’t understand.  He was sure he was being teased.  But if it got him closer to his bed it would put up with their games. ‘Just get me home’ he thought, careful not to speak aloud, to reveal his intentions. It would be the end of him if he did.  As if these sprites are anything like children, they will want to make him stay.  For as long as forever will allow.

Leading to an opening the fiery beasts appeared to giggle and laugh as they danced around him.   Their mouths always open and gushing out fire as the flame singed the hair of Joshua, making him swelter underneath his heavy sweater. ‘Okay, enough now.’  The lanterns giggled louder, and their dances quicker.  JHe singed, and burned as he knocked each lantern back, for them to push harder into him.  Knocking him over.  Waiting until he climbed to his feet, to push him down once again.  Finally he stopped, falling into a foetus position until finally, the lanterns tired out.  But their laughter continued.  Taunting the frail man who was singed from his burns, and bleeding out from a careless accident.  The orange bleeding light, the same that shone in the night sky, causing him to crash his truck flashed in the sky.  And he could see where that light was coming from.  The lanterns burst flames from their mouths. Shooting in the sky high above the woods. Flashing once, twice, a siren song for the damned. The pumpkins grins bounced as if to a beat. The turnips bashed against his skull like baseballs, a knock, and he was down once more.

He could see the candles in their mouths flickering.  The flames were dancing too.  But a dance of defiance.  Going against the odds of the wild winds to stay lit.  They danced because they were being extinguished. They laughed because they weren’t. He stood up and danced with the turnip lanterns, with the pumpkins too.  His arms flailed from side to side, reaching the sky, and brushing the ground and up once again. His knees reaching a height they’d never reached and his feet kicking the air in front of him. He laughed into the endless night as he jollied around and saw that there was a fire that was trying to be extinguished inside him, and no winds were to extinguish him tonight.  He was the turnip man. He danced because he was had fire in his mouth.  No blood spill, leech leaf, pumpkin lantern would destroy his spirit.  He lifted a lantern from the moving group, and laughed into its face.  He spit, and ripped his bloodied sweater from his body. 

There he saw the leaves with teeth and the small tree creatures that attached him, he chased them.  And the came to him. It was truce.  He built them around them.  He let the leaves suck his blood and the trees to capture his body.  And his body was encased in branches, bark and sharp flowing leaves.  His rooted to the earth, an inch more and further more as he danced and frolicked.  Joshua was no more, the man who was carries himself into the woods, entranced by an orange light went back into the earth as his arms stretched towards the lanterns. Laughing as he danced, it was a joyful decay.  The pumpkins and turnips dropped to the ground as the man in the woods took his last breath. His body turning into something that it wasn’t.  Waiting.  The orange beacon in the sky dimmed.  Everything quietly died.

‘Joey, get back here.’  A boy, seven years old ran into the woods, the sun was setting heavily, as if in a hurry to dim its light for a final time.  His older brother Dan gave chase.  He was meant to keep his little brother busy, yet Joey had got them lost again.   He followed him through the beech trees and there in an open field in the centre of the woods, in the middle of nowhere were scattered pumpkins and turnips, already carved, perfect for Halloween.  Dan, can we take some?  Joey’s persistence knew no bounds.  ‘Fine.  Whatever, just pick them up and we can leave.  This place gives me the creeps.’ Dan spat.  He swore he’d beat him senseless when he got home. 

He helped his little brother hoist yellowed turnips and dark orange pumpkins above the windows and through the garden.  Joey had taken more than they needed.  It didn’t matter Dan thought, Mom would just throw them out. Better her the bad guy then have to put up with another tantrum.

‘Did you hear children, laughing?’  Dan said, as he turned his back on the pumpkin patch watching the turnips frolic in the wind.  He could see the fires in their mouths flickering, refusing to give way to the winds. 
‘Yeah, I think it’s the neighbours?’  Joey said as he peered out the window. Half of his attention was on the television. But as he looked outwards hollow eyes looked straight into his.  Its eye burnt with the candle inside its mouth.  There was silence but inside his head Joey could hear a whisper… ‘come hither ‘ere into the woods boy, join us in a dance. Come see the turnip man.’ As the boy looked back to his brother, he found himself alone, as if in the hollow of the pumpkins eyes.  The woods he found himself in looked familiar as a giant beech tree grew in the centre. Dead pumpkins littered the ground as the bellow of singing children crept from the tree.  Dan turned to his brother to see nought but a smiling turnip swinging.  Dan looked into its hollowed eyes, and it looked straight into his.