Echoes of Spring (An Over the Garden Wall FanFiction)

Chapter 8: The Burning

Lorna's P.O.V.

Soon I see the house again. What a relief! I walk toward it, making sure not to trip again. I look at the latern in my hand. It feels warm, though there is no flame. And... I almost seem to remember something about it... A feeling like the one that the possessor brought to me surrounds this little lantern. I shake my head. I must still be frightened from the memory that I had in the woods.

I enter Aunty's house and close the door quietly behind me. Aunty Whispers moves slowly down the stairs to see me. "Hello, dearest!" She says.

"Hello, Aunty! I found this lantern, if you would like it." I show her the lantern and put it on the ground, then put the firewood near the fireplace and put a log into the dying embers. Aunty moves near the strange lantern and looks at it oddly.

"Hmm... This is an expensive lantern. Where did you find it, child?"

I stoke the flames a bit and turn to face her. "It was somewhere tossed away in the woods," I answer. I don't tell her about the ghostly feeling I had. I don't feel it now.

"Well, it's very nice. Would you light it for me? I always think it is too dark in here..." For some reason, when she asks me to light the lantern, a jolt goes through my body. It screams for me not to light it. But something else tells me to light it, to burn it, to please Aunty. What harm is some lantern anyway?

"Alright," I say, shrugging off worries. I take a small price of wood from a shelf and put one end in the flames of the fire. It burns easily. I move over to the lantern and take it in my hands.

The feeling is back. My body is screaming. Screaming! I can't do this, I can't! But a voice, some low voice, tells me: "you and Whispers will be safe. You will be spared." Spared? Spared from what? I am frantic. Part of me wants to back away from this thing, and part of me feels some eerie feeling, some familiar feeling, some animal feeling that I must light this. I must. I feel like I am being electrocuted by these two instincts, and I violently shakse. Both the lantern and torch drop from my hands into the floor. They are both unharmed.

Aunty looks at me, worried. "Are you alright, child?" I am not alright. I stare down at the floor, at the lantern. Its door opened in the fall, and that feeling of the possessor fills the room, then is gone again, and the flame flashes black for a split second, just before the flame of the torch spreads and the lantern lights.

I feel in the deepest parts of my very soul that everything, everything,  is doomed.