My brother is dead. As I sit looking into the tattered brown box that sits in my lap, I know that now. And while I know the thing called Candleheart is to blame, I still feel like it’s really my fault. It was my suggestion that put us in its path in the first place.
Two years ago, our father passed away. He was only 61 years old, but he’d had a bad heart for a number of years, so when I got the call that he had died in his sleep, it was terrible news, but not really a shock either. I had gotten on a plane the next morning, and when I arrived, Michael picked me up from the airport. He was a good little brother as little brothers go, and while he was ten years younger than me at 24, we had always gotten along well and remained friends even when I moved across the country after college.
We talked on the trip back to the house, alternating between catching up on the latest happenings in each others’ lives and talking about our father. That rhythm continued over the next few days when we had time alone together, which wasn’t much between helping our mother and dealing with friends and relatives. But after the funeral was done and the last of the mourners had left, our mother had announced she was going to go sleep for a good long while, no doubt aided by the pills I had seen our Aunt Clara pressing into our mother’s palm after the graveside service. So me and Michael decided to head into town and get something to eat.
It was while we were eating hot wings and reminiscing about our dad that the idea of taking a camping trip came up. Our father, who was no real outdoorsman, had always enjoyed camping for some reason, and when we were growing up he would always try to get us to go out camping with him. In truth we only went a few times over the years, but I still remember how happy it seemed to make him. Those camping trips seemed part of some idyllic familial fantasy to him, and no matter how much our mother protested the bugs or myself and Michael argued, he would always bring it up once or twice a year like a car salesman trying to entice us into another test drive.
Looking back on it now, I admit to feeling some guilt that we hadn’t
gone more when he suggested it. And I know that guilt is part of what
prompted me to ask Michael if he wanted to go camping that weekend.
I expected him to laugh or make an excuse why we couldn’t do it, but instead he started nodding right away. He still lived at home, and he said that a couple of days away from there, assuming Mom was doing okay, would suit him just fine. We started making plans, and when we got back to the house we found enough camping gear in decent shape that our costs aside from gas and food would be minimal. So after talking it over with our mother and making sure she was good for the next few days, we headed off the next morning on our camping adventure.
I had wanted to go to an established camping area with designated campsites and a building containing toilets and showers, but Michael convinced me that it wouldn’t be in the spirit of things to half-ass it. We needed to go somewhere off the beaten track where we weren’t surrounded by people and had to squat to take a dump. His argument was less than eloquent, but I got his point. We wanted it to be a trip our Dad would think was really cool.
So he found us a large state park covered by forest about a hundred miles away. After downloading maps and considering our options, we settled on a loose plan that involved parking on the west side of the park, hiking in about ten miles to a smallish body of water called Winter’s Lake, and then setting up camp. Day two would be hanging out, hiking around a bit more, and then heading back out.
We got to the large gravel parking lot by ten that morning, and after adding the food and water we had bought on the trip up to our backpacks, we headed east into the forest. Despite it being a bright and sunny day, parts of the forest were surprisingly dark, the large hardwoods that loomed overhead blocking out much of the light as we traveled along what looked like some kind of pig path in a generally easterly direction.
I had some concerns with us getting lost, but Michael did a surprisingly good job of keeping us on course, periodically checking the compass he had brought and calling out a couple spots where he could see what looked like landmarks from the map. The past few days, seeing him help our mother and remain patient and kind with all of the other mourners, had helped me appreciate how much my brother had grown up. He could still be immature at times, and I know he still relied on me for some things because I was his big sister, but he had become a man, and a good one at that.
I was thinking about that and looking off into the trees when I ran into the back of him. He stumbled a step forward and then turned to look at me. “Watch it. Gave me a flat tire.” He shot me a mock frown before grinning as he pointed. “Look over there.”
I followed his finger and saw that fifty yards to our left there was what looked to be the ruins of some old, large house. It was surrounded by trees and bushes so thick that it was easy to overlook, and if we had been a bit further away I doubt we would have seen it at all. I would have preferred that, because the place
“Looks creepy. Looks like the start of a horror movie.” I glanced at Michael, seeing the look on his face. “No sir. No way. We’re not going to be the dumb bitches that go explore the abandoned house to get eaten by the hillbilly zombies that live there. We’re going to be the smart bitches that keep moving and go eat smores.”
His frown was genuine now. “But it looks badass.” He pointed at it again as though to drive home his point. “Look at how badass that is.”
I shook my head. “You know what’s not badass? Snakebites. Falling through rotten floorboards. The aforementioned hillbilly zombies. Let’s go.”
“Fine. You suck. Robbed us of a really cool story and pictures too. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
I nudged him forward. “I think you’ll survive.”
Another half hour and we were at Lake Winter. It was actually a bit bigger than I thought it’d be, and while calling it a lake was still somewhat grandiose, I had to admit that there was something striking about it. The shore was made up of small gray rocks that we had not seen anywhere else in our walk here, and the water itself was a placid, steely blue. Compared to the brownish green ponds I was used to seeing growing up just a hundred miles south, it seemed almost like the rocks and water had been plucked from another continent, maybe one with Vikings.
Turning to Michael, I gestured towards the lake. “See? This is cool.”
He looked skeptical. “It’s all right, yeah. It’s kinda weird. Do you think it was man-made?”
I shrugged. “I guess it’s possible, but it would cost a ton for something this size, and given that it’s a state park, wouldn’t there be some kind of sign up or some marker saying who donated money for it or something? Either way, let’s get back up on the grass some to set up the tents. My ass does not need eight hours of sleeping on those hard little rocks.”
We set up camp and got a fire going, and after taking a long walk around the oval perimeter of the lake, we settled in to cooking hot dogs as twilight began to darken into night. While I was tired, I wasn’t ready to go to sleep yet, and I was having to fight the urge to pull out my phone and start playing a game or watching a video. I heard Michael grunt and looked up from my plate to see he was already poking at his phone discontentedly.
“I have like one bar. My browser has shit on itself and died twice.”
I scowled at him. “Good. We’re supposed to be out here camping and having family bonding time.” He flipped me off and stuffed the phone back in his pocket.
“Okay. Well, I have to take a piss. So don’t do any bonding without me while I’m gone.” With that, he jumped up and headed back off toward the trees. When I saw him continuing to go the hundred yards or so to the edge of the forest, I thought about yelling that he didn’t actually have to piss on a tree. Instead I just shook my head and went back to eating my hot dog.
About a minute later, I heard Michael yelling something to me. I looked up and I saw him at the edge of the trees, shifting from the ball of one foot to the other as though trying to get a better look at something with his flashlight. I yelled back and asked what he had said. Faintly I heard him respond.
“I think I see something. A light or something? It’s closer now than it was.”
For whatever reason, I felt my stomach go cold. Sitting down my plate, I stood up and walked a few steps away from the campfire, my eyes locked on Michael’s barely illuminated form.
“Michael, come back from there. Come here, please.”
I saw him turn towards me, and then something made him turn back to the woods. I heard him yell, “What the fuck…Oh God. No, fuck!”, and started running to me. I was going to ask what was wrong, but then I saw the figure stepping out of the brush.
At that distance and in the dark, I couldn’t make much out. The only light that touched it came from the partial moon glowing spectrally above the lake and some kind of flickering light on the shape itself. But from what I could tell it looked like a large man, and my desire to encounter some large stranger in the middle of the nighttime woods was less than zero.
As Michael made his way closer to the firelight, I could see by his face that he was terrified. I was going to ask who it was or what was wrong, but he was already yelling again.
“We’ve got to go! Run, leave everything, just run!” He grabbed my arm and started pulling on me, but I resisted for a moment, wanting to understand.
“What? What is it? What’s wrong?” I glanced back at the approaching figure and I could only make out slightly more detail. His feet seemed abnormally large and strange, and it looked as though he was wearing some kind of hood or cloak, as I could see something billowing behind him. But the oddest thing was the light he was holding. It was flickering like some kind of flame, and I guessed it must be a lantern of some sort, but in the dark it almost looked like it was a part of him.
Michael yanked my arm again. “It’s some kind of monster. I don’t know. But it looks fucking real. Let’s GO!” This time he pulled enough to propel me forward and I started running with him. I still had in the back of my mind it might be some kind of elaborate joke, whether Michael was in on it or not, but he looked scared enough that I wasn’t taking any chances.
We ran towards the woods, Michael moving his grip down to my hand as we hit the brush at the edge of the clearing and kept going. I glanced back and saw the figure had changed course and was heading towards us, but at a measured, almost leisurely pace. Good, I thought, Please let him keep going slow. We ran a few more feet before Michael looked back and came to a stop.
“He’s gone.”
I looked around panting and saw he was right. In the span of less than ten seconds, it had gone from walking towards us across the clearing to vanishing into thin air. That didn’t do anything to make me less afraid.
“Keep moving, Michael. Let’s get out of here.”
We started back running, trying to strike the right balance between speed and not breaking something in the dark. We only had the one flashlight between us, with mine having been left back in my tent near the lake. The blackness of the woods felt like a palpable thing, some kind of thick, cool liquid with a weight and viscosity we had to push against as we made our way forward. Michael would periodically stop and glance at his compass, and both of us were constantly scanning our surroundings for any sign of an approaching shadow or the strange glow of firelight.
We made the journey back to the car in a fraction of the time it had taken us to leave it, and when we stepped out onto the gravel, I stopped to catch a few lungs worth of gasping breath. Still bent over, I started fumbling in my pocket for the keys when I heard Michael screaming. My head snapped up and I saw him trying to backpedal from the thing that had somehow pursued us across ten miles without being seen.
At this distance, and with the parking lot illuminated by the pale moonlight, I could see the creature much better. It looked like a man, or at least the crude, monstrous approximation of one. It stood around seven feet tall, its head and torso partially covered by some kind of thin and rotting shroud. The skin underneath looked like some kind of dark stone or clay in the darkness, with arms and legs of the same material, but bearing the appearance of hard, twisted appendages like the branches of some sinister looking tree dwelling deep in the heart of a forgotten and decaying swamp. It reached one of those arms out and grasped Michael’s arm in a clawed hand that turned his screams of terror into screeches of pain.
“He’s biting me! He’s biting me!”
I was already in motion to pull Michael free, but his words sunk in enough for me to find them strange. I could see little of the thing’s face, but I didn’t see its mouth anywhere near my brother. I grabbed Michael’s other arm and pulled, afraid it would do little good. To my surprise, I saw the monster let go as I tugged, and in the dim light I saw something my mind didn’t want to accept. The palm of the thing’s hand was filled with a black void that dripped with my brother’s blood. When I thought about it later, I realized I had also glimpsed silvery teeth retreating back into that oval hole in its hand. Small and sharp, I had saw the glittering of two rows in the moment before I turned away and pulled Michael with me toward the car.
I expected to be caught at any moment, that horrible biting grasp falling onto my shoulder or the back of my neck. But nothing came. When we were inside the car and I turned the headlights on, I could see that the creature was still standing where we had left it, silently staring at us. The lower half of its body was illuminated by the lights, showing thick legs that ended in something more akin to roots than any kind of feet. And above the line of the car’s lights, the fire flickered on.
The monster wasn’t holding a light. It was the light. In the right upper part of the thing’s chest, where a heart would lay beating in a man, there was a hole over half a foot wide that went all the way through its body from front to back. In that hole, a large yellowish brown candle burned brightly, illuminating whatever material made up the surrounding flesh and a portion of the tattered shroud that draped down the creature’s back.
I found myself growing transfixed by that flame, and it was a shove from Michael that woke me out of it. Nodding, I threw the car into drive and spun out of the parking lot.
Michael was understandably hysterical, and I was too, though I tried to keep control for both our sakes. We debated going to a hospital, a hotel, or home. We both quickly ruled out home until we had some time to calm down and make sure we wouldn’t be followed further. I pushed for the hospital, but Michael said he just wanted to get a room some ways away from the park and look at his arm before we made a decision on that. I thought about arguing further, but given his state, I relented.
I drove another thirty minutes and then pulled in at a decent-looking motel. When we got into the room, I took him to the bathroom and we looked at his arm. I knew immediately we had made a mistake and he needed to go to a hospital. It looked like a small chunk had been ripped out of his arm, the edges of it ragged with small holes as though the thing had been biting and raking its teeth into his flesh trying to find a good purchase to tear a part free. The perimeter of the hole was also looking darker than it should, with several sinister-looking lines starting to push out from the wound itself.
“We have to get you to a doctor, now.” He was already starting to shake his head, and I stopped him. “No. Not a conversation. You could have an infection or be poisoned. And we’ll be as safe or safer at a hospital than we are here.”
As the last words left me, I heard the front door of the room swing open. Leaning and looking out of the bathroom door, I saw the thing standing in the doorway, the lights in the room showing me more of it than before. I let out a scream and shoved the bathroom door shut, keeping my weight against it, but I knew it wouldn’t be any real barrier to that thing. I knew I had locked the room door and put the chain on, but it had somehow walked in like those locks didn’t exist.
I looked for a bathroom window, but there was none. I had time to look into Michael’s terrified eyes and see that he knew what was out there before the door was flung open and I was shoved out of the way and into the wall. Michael began to squeal like some kind of caught animal as the thing reached into the tiny room and grabbed him by the forearm, casually dragging him out despite my brother’s desperate attempts to hold onto the sink and then the doorframe.
I got back up and launched myself past Michael and onto the
creature’s back. I tried to find purchase on it, digging my fingers
into its flesh and finding it to be somewhat yielding even as I gagged.
The smell as I broke the surface of its skin was like that of rotten
meat, and the texture of the material itself seemed like some kind of
hard wax.
Pausing for a moment, its free arm bent backwards and grabbed me by the neck, pulling me free from its back. It swung me around until I was facing it. I could distantly feel the hard rasp of teeth scraping the skin on the side of my neck eagerly without actually biting down, but my thoughts were preoccupied by its face.
Any crude shapings or strange, blunt lines of its body did not carry over into that face. There was a well-shaped, long curving nose over thick, batrachian lips that tipped upward at the ends as it looked at me. Its eyes were some kind of glowing stone, almost like large fire opals given some inner iridescence, flaring in time with the terrible sound it made deep in the black hollows of its throat.
It was chuckling at me.
I was barely able to breathe, but I was going to try and plead for my brother and myself, despite the cruelty and malignant pleasure I saw etched across its features. But then it flung me aside, sending me crashing through the front window of the room a moment before dragging Michael out the door.
For a few seconds my world was flashes and noise and pain. I knew I needed to pull myself together, to try again, but I couldn’t make my body work right. Rolling over on my side, I saw the thing pulling Michael with him, the keening animal wail having dwindled to a defeated muffled groan. As I watched, I saw the thing and Michael sinking into the earth as they proceeded forward, almost as though they were walking into the tide of some earthen sea. I let out a scream, and I saw Michael reach out his hand to me feebly a moment before they both disappeared into the ground.
I lay on the concrete outside the room, broken and bleeding, for some time before anyone came out and called 911. I went to the hospital, and the next day I had to tell my hysterical mother that I had somehow lost her son. I tried to tell people the truth of what happened, but they looked at me sympathetically and talked about head trauma and shock. So then I told a more palatable version of a man attacking us at our campsite and then the motel, and that got some level of search parties and investigation, but of course nothing was ever found.
Two years have passed since that time, and despite my own efforts, I’ve never found my brother. I’ve been back to those woods a dozen times, but things are never as they were on that trip we took. I never see the ruins of that old house, and Winter Lake is a small, yellowed pond, not what we camped near on the night Michael was taken. And I’ve never seen Candleheart again.
I know he’s called Candleheart by some because of the research I’ve done. There are very few references, even in the darker and more eccentric corners of the internet, but I found a forum post that described the legend of a monster with mouths on its hands that abducted and sacrificed people. The comments were rife with more random speculation and odd tales about rituals and what the motives of the monster really were, but no one had anything verifiable or frankly very credible sounding. But there was one brief reply that caught my attention.
Its name is Candleheart. It feeds the dark things of the earth for its own profit and waits for Winter’s return.
I tried to contact the poster, but I never received any response, and while the name Candleheart makes sense, I’ve never found another reference to it in relation to the monster. After a year of trying, I’m ashamed to say I gave up. It was too hard to keep living every day reliving what had happened to Michael, looking for some clue or sign that might help him, lying to myself more as time passed about the odds that he could still be okay or even alive.
Within the last couple of months life has started to feel less terrible. Not like it used to be, but somewhat better. Therapy for me and Mom has helped, but most of it has been time. I realized last week I had gone an entire day without thinking about Michael, and it made me both relieved and terribly sad.
Then this morning I opened my door to go to work and found the box. It was of thick, high quality cardboard, though it was ragged in spots and had several stains along the top. A little larger than a cake box, it was tied with a rough twine string that I had to saw at to cut off with a kitchen knife. There was no writing or label, so I was slightly leery of opening it at all, but my curiosity and growing dread told me I had to know what was inside.
When I took off the top and looked inside, I stopped breathing. The box contained Michael’s face. Not his literal face, but a yellowish mask of it. A death mask.
My skin crawling, I reached out and touched its surface, already knowing what I’d feel. It was made of wax. And my God. It was screaming.
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Credits
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