When the shadow lanterns’ shadows dance, wise men stay abed.
When dark dreams slip their masters’ leash, children hide their heads.
Someone has lit the shadow lamps.
He can see them, scattered through the forest. Their white paper glows against dark black bark, and the figures printed on their skin are stark and clear. On the ground below the lanterns the long-haired girls and cloaked boys grow larger than life, bisected by spirals and grasping branches of shadow.
He curses his luck, curses the night and the cold, curses the warm glow he can only imagine, somewhere on the other side of the slumbering trees. Every sane thought tells him that he should turn back, should take three steps away without breaking eye contact and then spin and run, quick as wind and thought, back to the village he can still feel slumbering behind him.
But sense lost its hold on him when Matthias kissed him.
And Matthias waits, a lantern on a mossy rock beside him, the unanswered question echoing between them. If he goes home now, lets the question sigh and slip into empty air, he will never feel the touch of those lips again. Never run down the track with Matthias’ hand in his, a grin hurting his cheeks with its unfamiliar stretch.
He takes a step into the trees.
Stories, aren’t they? The shadow lamps and their curses and monsters. No one knows who places the lamps, or how their cold white light is lit. No one has ever seen them take someone, though everyone has a story of a friend of a friend. Everyone has heard the screams on shadow nights and prayed that the victim was no friend of theirs. But stories can’t hurt you. Shadows are just tricks of light.
He takes another step.
The shadow figures shift and flicker with movement. Just the wind, he tells himself, and hears the deafening sound of his own breath. The trees are silent; their leaves still. A light breeze, then. Light enough not to move the leaves, but it can rock the lanterns, secure in their iron hold, spiral hooks threaded through the lowest, thickest branches. Or maybe they are rocking still from when they were lit; that must be in. The movement has not stilled, not yet, and so the people shift and squirm, like snakes trying to free themselves from their own prisoning skin.
He walks faster. His steps skirt the unnaturally dark shadows, stray into brambles rather than tiptoe across a woman’s belled-out skirt.
The forest stretches near a mile thick, and twenty wide. Minutes stretch into infinities in the silver pools of lantern light, and he can no longer fathom how long he has walked. Should the edge of the forest be close now? Or has his journey only begun, fear kneading time so it lengthens under its knuckles, stretched out of shape? A sound to his right. A scream! An owl, he chastises himself, and yet his eyes are glued to the shades of grey. He remembers Matthias’ hand on the side of his face, the promise in his eyes. He should have answered him then!
He retreats, only a step or two, unwatching.
Cold seizes his heart, and goosebumps rise on the exposed skin of his lower arms. He looks down, fear growing swiftly into horror. He has stepped directly into a shadow, the ball of his foot balanced in the cupped, outstretched hand of a young boy. His foot is glued to the ground, his leg trembling, and he knows that this will answer the question once and for all.
He should have answered, he thinks. He should have said yes. Yes. I’ll marry you.
Touch a shadow with your flesh, and the lantern takes your soul.
You’ll dance with the others in their phantom dress, caught for ever more.
This image comes courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.