LIGHT THE WAY

LIGHT THE WAY
by Elena Laskowski

In the bogland, everything is as it was ten years ago.

The trees provide coverage for the swampy grounds; a forested wetland with connecting pools of algae-water and paths of dampened grass grown wild and emerald in their silent haven.

My shoes squelch in the muddy earth as we trek through slick vines and toe-brushing moss. The air is softly humid with an occasional coolness, like a subtle suffocation. Beads of sweat drip down my neck only to make me shiver. The darkness of the forest is deepening with the drop of the sun setting somewhere outside these natural walls. I’ve been watching an orange shaft traveling down Henry’s back. Soon, it’ll hit the heels of his boots and then be sucked into the soil. It was twilight last time, too.

Henry stops ahead of me, halting while the sun shaft finally moves away. He points to a tree stump to our right, encircled by stout mushroom caps.

“Does that look familiar to you?” he twists his neck to ask me earnestly.

He’s worried we’re going in circles. We’re not.

“It looks like a tree stump,” I reply.

He sighs and walks over to it in order to plop down with his hands tangled in his hair. “I wish Liz was here. Carrying around that stupid compass.”

“We’re here for her,” I remind him.

He looks up at me with his I’m-about-to-be-honest-face: mouth in a firm line and brows furrowed in concern above his glasses. It’s the same look he gave when we were six before admitting to breaking my space station Lego set, and the same one from last week when he told me he too had always wanted to come back here.

“Hey” he says quietly. “Are we really expecting to find her?”

I’m not sure if I should respond to that. We never said that was our reason for coming back, not explicitly. But maybe he thought it was implied.

In my silence, Henry releases a shaky breath and rubs at a patch of dirt on his faded jeans. “I don’t know what’s less likely,” he says so quietly I almost don’t catch it. “That we’ll see our cousin that’s been missing for ten years, or the lights.”

A sudden chill runs its course down my body, starting at the base of my skull and snaking down to my ankles. “You said you thought you imagined that.”

Henry shrugs. “Sometimes I think I imagined that whole day. And then I go to Dad’s to visit and see Aunt Jamie talking to herself in a ball on the couch.”

I know what he means. There’s no forgetting for long what happened to Liz, not when her mother hasn’t said a coherent sentence in years and spends her days with reddened eyes locked on Wheel of Fortune reruns.

But nothing could make me forget the lights. Not for a second.

“What was it you called them?” Henry asks. “Wisps?”
“Will o’ wisps, yeah,” I reply. The title feels odd on my tongue, clunky instead of clever. Unfitting of the image, though that was what most related lore dictated them as. There were a few other names I found in my research, but I didn’t want to freak Henry out.

“I only caught a bare glimpse of it from a ways away, but man…” Henry trails off momentarily before finishing: “Something else.”

I’m being pulled back now, into this same swamp a decade ago where Liz and I stumbled into a thicket of reeds at twilight – She had a flashlight in one hand and a compass in the other. Henry had fallen behind us. A few yards away amidst the inky green tangles, two weeping willows bordered a glassy pond. Something blue and ethereal floated above the water, like flame. I blinked, and another one appeared. My sight couldn’t quite latch onto what I was seeing. I took a step closer, trying to make out its shape. Beside me, Liz clicked off the flashlight and whistled softly into the still air: “Look at that.” Eyes glued forward, she walked towards it.

“Sorry.” Henry’s voice cuts through the memory as he pushes himself off the stump. “We can keep moving.”

I shake my head in an effort to clear it and then nod. “Yeah, let’s go.”

It takes me a second to realize he’s looking at me weirdly. “You alright?” he asks with a hint of brotherly concern. “You looked a little…confused for a second.”
“I’m fine,” I say and start walking. He follows.

The sun has sunk firmly into evening and the darkness bleeds and spills through gaps in the foliage. It really is eerily similar to the first time we trekked this terrain, having snuck off from the family vacation at sunset to explore the acres of wetland around our campsite. There was so much space to cover, so many trees and mud spots and pools of algae water that appeared long untouched, that we had just set off in a random direction to wander. I don’t know how, exactly, but I can tell that we’re on the very same route now.

Henry steps carefully in front of me and I find myself growing impatient with him. The slow, heavy tracks he makes are flinchingly loud and force me to shorten my own pace. Just when I’m about to surge past him on my own, he turns back to look at me with wide eyes.

“It was just past there, wasn’t it?” he half-whispers and I crane my neck to peer around him. Another shiver washes over me at the sight of the two shadowy willows. We’re too far away to see anything beyond them.

Henry is talking, but it takes me a second to tune in. My skin feels chilled to the bone, my mind foggy and unfocused. I think he’s saying my name, but for a moment I barely recognize it. “Did you and Liz both walk in there?” he asks. “Is that where you lost sight of her? I could barely see past the trees.”

She had gone in first. Surged toward the blue lights with a reverent grace and held her hand out over the water. One floated towards her with a sound that was more like a vibration in the air; a frequency we could feel more than hear. The sight of her awed face in the ghostly glow of the flame, her features lit and shadowed like the moon and its crevices, was unearthly.

I move past Henry and push through the muck and weeds, dampness clinging to the hem of my pants. The weeping willows are a softly stinging curtain that I part with my hands and enter through. The pond is as it lives in my memory: a still surface like glass in the middle of this darkened copse. Henry’s voice is somewhere behind me, though I’m not listening to it.

In the corner of my eye, it emerges. A small one, like a candle, twists and curls above the water near the edge of the pond. I take a step closer, but then it begins to move forwards. Gliding of its own accord until slowing to a stop a few feet from where I stand. Pulse pounding, I realize I can feel it. Not warmth, like a true flame, but an aura of cold like standing near an icebox. I look down at the length of water that it illuminates.

Staring back at me beneath the surface are a pair of blank eyes.

It’s all at the forefront of my memory now; how one moment Liz was reaching for the flame and the next her body wasn’t upright anymore. She didn’t jump, she didn’t fall, she just…slipped in without a sound.
And now here she is suspended on her back beneath the water; hair splayed to the sides like strands of seaweed, her body pale and preserved. The skin is mottled only by a few patches of dead cells on her face and neck – they’re darkened and scaly, like some rotting underwater creature. Suddenly, another blue flame appears next to the first. For a moment it seems that Liz has grown a third arm, like one of those three headed frogs spawned from mutation, but it’s not her. It’s another lifeless body in the pond, wearing breeches and a long shirt with the kind of frills and cuffs from a fashion centuries out of style. More of the flames appear above the water’s surface, each one bringing similarly clothed bodies to light. I recall then another name for the flames: corpse candles.

It’s a pond full of corpses.

I had reached towards Liz, unsure of where she’d gone. The flame she had been reaching towards had glided all the way to the edge of the water and I stood a few paces away, caught in its glow. A coldness had washed over me that was somehow both painful and comforting. I was unable to move my eyes from the orb of pure white at the center, the cerulean tendrils that surged upwards and danced like ribbons. I had extended my hand towards it in the same way as Liz, and then –

A hand on my shoulder tugs me around. “Seriously, are you feeling okay?” Henry asks. I’m still halfway in my own memory, recalling how coolly soothing the fire was, how it still is now just from being near it. He knits his brows when I don’t speak and peers around me. When he sees the lights, he gasps and lets go of my arm. I can see the reflection of the flames in his eyes as he stares open mouthed.

“What are they?” he whispers and takes a small step forwards.

I don’t plan on speaking but then, instinctively, I am. “Swamp gas,” I hear myself say. The rational explanation, from “experts” who’ve never laid eyes on what they speak of.
He looks at me in surprise. “Swamp gas?”

Nodding, I gesture to the lights. “Decomposing vegetation. When it combusts, it looks like that.” Even more have appeared since we started talking. The whole pond is covered by them. “You can even touch it,” I add.

He’s frowning. “It doesn’t look real,” he mutters.

I can tell he’s entranced. He hasn’t stopped staring at the flames, not even noticing what lies underneath them.

“Go on,” I say. “Touch one. It’s cool.”

Despite his hesitance, there’s trust in his face and flame in his eyes. “You’re sure?” he asks me.

I smile. “‘Course.”

He steps to the edge, toes on the muck that leaches into liquid inches away. He reaches out his hand, just like her, and the nearest flame meets his finger with the curl of a tendril.

When it had been me on that bank, the flame had grown. It eclipsed the size of my head and wreathed itself around me, circling my body in one streak of blue and white. It felt like taking a breath of air for the very first time. Any discomfort in my muscles, my flesh, had evaporated. I heard a voice then, from inside my head. Many voices, like a murmuring chorus all speaking at once in different tones. But they all said the same thing: Go.

As soon as he makes contact with the flame, he slips away just like she did. Quietly, without a splash or yell. I know if I look, he’ll be lying rigid in the water next to her. Their jeans and t-shirts are a contrast to the antiquated clothing of the pond’s other occupants.

There’s a small pang in my chest, but it’s swept away when I notice that the flame he touched burns a little brighter now. It pulses with vitality. I make my way to where they both once stood and wait for it to come to me. When it does, it wraps around me just like it did last time. It feels glorious; a rapturous bliss that absorbs my thoughts and pains. This, I think with sudden clarity. This was what I returned for. The flame encircles me completely with a blinding aura, embracing me fondly. And again, it whispers all its voices in my mind.

Another, it tells me.

Fiction © Copyright Elena Laskowski
Base Image by Giovanni from Pixabay

Elena Laskowski writes poetry and short fiction of multiple genres and is currently pursuing a BFA in creative writing in Minnesota. She has had works published in her university’s literary journal and magazine. Last year, she and her father self-published a collection of poems and photographs titled “Inheritance”. You can find her on Instagram @elena_la19