This all went down a few years back.
It was mid-January and there was a fairly strong blizzard going on outside. I had been watching television most of the night, waiting to be tired enough to fall asleep, and decided to open the back door onto the patio to have a cigarette. I leaned my head out into the storm and, with the wind and the blowing snow, it was like having my face sandblasted. While I was standing there smoking, I noticed a small orange light flickering in the storm.
Our house is on a hill in a small valley, and halfway up the hill there’s a little cottage that serves only as a summer camp to distant relatives of ours. The camp is old, and in poor repair. At one time it was a small schoolhouse—my father went there when he was very little—but for as long as I can remember, it’s been empty except for two or three nights a summer. The camp had once been white with purple shutters, and probably very cute, but over the years, the colours had faded. Now the building was a dreary gray with pink shutters; to look at it made you feel just the smallest bit sick. This rotten little camp is where the flickering light was coming from.
I stared for the longest time at that light. It looked so much like a flickering candle that I was afraid the camp had somehow caught fire. That was unlikely, though; the camp was without power, and it was winter, no one had been to the camp in months. My father happened to wake up and came out to see what I was doing with my head outside. He saw the light as well and agreed that while it was unlikely to be a fire, it certainly looked like candlelight. He told me to get dressed and walk up to the camp to see what it was.
To be honest, I really didn’t want to go up to this camp. I had been thinking it over while I stared at the light. There was no way the camp was on fire, and the people who owned it definitely hadn’t decided to show up during a mid-winter blizzard at 2:30am, so the only logical answer was that the light had been lit by someone who didn’t belong in the camp. Be it a thief, a drunk, or a psychotic, I did not want to deal with them. More than that though, I had always been a little afraid of this camp. When I was a child I had to run past it on the far side of the road because I was certain a witch lived there. On more than one occasion I thought I saw her peeking at me from behind the tattered and wispy white curtains. I also used to have nightmares about being stuck inside the camp with all those dusty and forgotten things, and not being able to scream loud enough to get anyone’s attention. But, as any guy can tell you, when your father nonchalantly suggests you do something you think is scary, you man-up and do it or you admit to him you are a wuss.
I put on some winter clothes, grabbed a flashlight, pocketed a hunting knife without my father seeing, and started up the hill. My father was standing where I had been, with his head hanging out the door, but that was little comfort because by the time I reached the end of the driveway, the wind had come up and I couldn’t see my house. My father wouldn’t be able to see me or hear me regardless of what happened.
I walked up the hill in the blizzard, and when I got to where the driveway to the camp should have been—it was covered by a foot of snow—and after shining the flashlight around, I realized there were no footprints going into the camp from any direction. An ugly thought bloomed in my mind.
Nobody went into this camp. This camp is empty. Something lit that light.
I felt about 6 years old again.
The windows at the front of the camp were lit up like jack-o-lantern eyes, and I had to force myself to walk towards it. I stepped up onto the old deck at the front of the building and looked inside one the windows.
I was looking into a kitchen, a small table, two chairs, a black iron wood-stove. There was a small light, not a candle, but a flickering battery-operated light on top of a shelf. The floor was checkerboard laminate, probably meant to be black-and-white but green-and-peach in the orange light. The checkerboard extended from the kitchen down into the dark hallway that leads to the rest of the camp. I was trying to think of how the light could have suddenly come on when the worst image I’ve ever thought of came crashing into my head. While I was staring into the dark of the hallway, I imagined a woman running out of the darkness at me, screaming, with eyes-wide and arms reaching out towards me.
I stood up, turned around, and jogged back towards my house, refusing to look back over my shoulder. My skin was crawling and I was sheet-white by the time I was safe inside. I had a hard time sleeping that night, and I never did find out how that little light came on. My father figured it must have been some sort of solar light that we just hadn’t noticed before, but that wasn’t much of an explanation because it had never came on before, and we didn’t see it again that winter.
It’s on again tonight.
