The Candle of Death

By Rick Hartford

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window."

The campers sitting around the fire were wide-eyed as Roger began his story.

Roger, the senior counselor, was sitting cross legged in the circle.

He had a baseball bat in his lap.

One of the campers, Brent, asked why.

Roger said it was a prop.

“What’s a prop?” Brent asked.

“You’ll find out. Keep quiet,” Roger said.

Roger continued his story as the flames flickered and ashes and smoke rose into the sky.

“The Gimp saw it for the first time when he raised his head from his meal.

Blood and gore dripped from his lips as he chewed noisily on bloody gristle. His eyes narrowed, his brain churning like a bucket of snakes. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and threw a bone into the fire.

He got to his feet. The candle in the window. Had it been there before?

The Gimp thought not. He would have remembered it.

Wouldn’t he?

The Gimp didn’t want to abandon this spot in the woods. It had been a great place to drag his prey.

It was a relatively short distance from the trail, travelled by the young men and women who still thought they were guaranteed a happy ending, which was, although they never articulated it, the chance to grow old and gray without the physical or emotional scars associated with a brutal life.

So when the prospect, no, the certainty, that their lives were about to end, that they only served in the end to be a meal, they whimpered and pleaded for another chance. Just One More Chance. They begged, tears flowing down their faces as they finally stopped trying to free themselves from the piano wire bonds which held them like pigs for the slaughter.

The Gimp reveled in the memories, the guttural noises they made as they screamed against the ball shoved into their mouths, the widening of the fevered eyes as they saw the Gimp raising the bat over his head.

The Gimp loved it so, the anticipation of the sound as the bat connected with a skull, a dull thunk like a cantaloupe hit with a sledge hammer.”

Roger picked up the bat and slapped it into his palm. It made an ugly smack and a few of the campers jumped backward.

He continued.

“The candle in the window would scare the hikers away, the Gimp realized.

They would fear that they were being watched by something evil. They would hurry away, hoping to swiftly get to the safety of their cars in the parking lot.

They were right to be afraid. It was the Gimp who waited for them in the dark.

And now he was being robbed by by the owner of that candle.

The Gimp decided to put this to an end.

The next night, he crept silently toward the front door, his bludgeon in his right hand. He heard what sounded like a witch’s cackle on the other side of the door.

He burst in, bludgeon at the ready. In front of him on the floor was his own mother, her stomach grotesquely swollen. The Gimp could make out a face through the luminescent skin of his mother’s belly.

“Who have you eaten, mother?” the Gimp said quietly.

“Why, say hello to your sister Rosetta, Gimpy,” the satiated woman on the floor said.

The Gimp stared harder at the form of a head pressed up against the skin. Yes it was Rosetta.

“I swallowed her whole,” his mother said. "I had to dislocate my jaw to do it, don't you know."

The Gimp went to the ice box and got out a beer, cracking the pop top and gulping down half a can. Foam dripped down his jaw.

It was hard to believe that his own mother was an anaconda, but there it was.

She had always said, “Gimpy, you can be anything you want in this life. You just have to believe in yourself.”

She wanted to be a boa constrictor, and now she was one. The Gimp had followed her example. And now he was a cannibal.

He found it hard to complain, under the circumstances. And yet…

“Ma,” he said.

“Do you really need that candle in the window?”

“I am afraid of the dark.”

“Ok then. Can you show me how you dislocate your jaw?”

“It’s a trade secret, Gimpy, but I’ll show you. Only you.”

While she busied herself with the task, the Gimp gripped his bludgeon and brought it far back for maximum effect.

Roger stopped talking, a strange darkness filling the void where his words once were. He looked at each camper one at a time around the circle, watching their nervous expressions, the dancing firelight in their eyes. He swung his bat, again and again. And soon he was covered in warm, sticky blood, its smell electric, the screams still echoing in his ears. Some tried to escape into the forest, but he chased them down and beat them to death.

Returning to the camp fire, a skull in each hand, Roger noticed that the light in the cabin was still flickering.

And then he could hear someone calling to him.

“It’s 9 o’clock. Time for bed!”

Roger’s mother stood on the porch with the door open, Rosetta clinging to her apron as they both watched Roger in the back yard.

His mother worried about her strange child, swinging that bat in the night like he was a monster in a nightmare.

Was he the reason her husband Bill had left her? One night Bill had gone out for a walk and never came back. Roger followed him, but when he returned home he said that he couldn’t keep up with his father.

“Roger, get in here right now!” his mother hollered one more time.

Roger picked up the blood-stained bat, holding it with both hands as he lumbered across the yard.

“Coming mother,” he whispered.