The Flashlight Game

The cottage on Thistleweed Lane was as close to untouched by time as you could get. Maddie had punched the address into the GPS, but somewhere along the way, she felt a weird sort of intuition take hold and she’d shut it off again once she got onto the dirt roads. Testing herself.

There was no reason to remember the route. She’d spent most of the ride in past years staring out the window of the back of her mom’s minivan or playing games with her sister. She’d never felt a feeling like this before, the simple knowing. Intuition was always Addie’s thing, not hers.

And yet she’d ended up here all the same, turned down the driveway with the mailbox canted to one side, the headlights of her old Toyota illuminating the front of the place: the white door, the peeling green paint on the shutters.

Thistle Cottage, as they’d called it in youth, had a distinct air of neglect about it. She knew the owner hadn’t been renting it out for the past ten years, but she would have thought he’d have spruced it up a little more before putting it on offer again. Maybe he was low on money; maybe this had been his only rental property and the events of the decade before had really taken a hit on him. It was all over the news when Addie died, and the cottage had a run of unwelcome publicity.

Whatever the reason, the house she found was a painful gash on her memory. When she saw it up for rent on her laptop, she’d had to check the AirBnB site a second and third time to make sure she wasn’t imagining it. She had to rent it, if only for a night or two. There was no other option.

Maddie hadn’t told her parents; if she had she imagined Mom would have freaked. And if the owner recognized her full name on the inquiry, he hadn’t said a thing about it- or the fact that she was only eighteen. She knew a lot of places didn’t like renting to people so young.

Maddie arrived late at night Friday, when she was supposed to be sound asleep in her dorm room 150 miles away. She took the key from under the mat where she was instructed she’d find it, and tramped into the sleeping house, feeling as she did that she was conducting some kind of awakening, that once she turned on the light by the door, there was no going back.

Stupid, she knew, but the spookiness of the ride had got into her head. When the kitchen lit up with its quaint wooden walls and worn dish rack, she immediately felt comforted. She could remember many late nights doing dishes at this sink. Addie, ever agreeable, had always agreed to dry, a task Maddie hated.

There wasn’t much Addie hadn’t agreed to, and wasn’t that the problem?

The problem is in you, a voice in her head said. As if she needed reminding. She unloaded her bag on the counter, noticing as she did that she only had one left in her bottle of Zoloft, rattling around forlornly. Not even enough for the next couple days, not that it mattered. The Zoloft had stopped doing what it was supposed to. For a while now, Addie had been having trouble getting up and going to classes again. She hadn’t mentioned it to her psychiatrist. She’d already been on a few things, and the shadows always moved back, expanding into her chest and throat. She was sick of it.

This trip was the most effort Madeline Walker had extended for a long, long time, and she intended to make it worth it.

How, though?

She didn’t exactly have a plan. She’d arrived with the vague notion of making herself face it all again, of resolutely walking the darker corridors and dead-ends of memory lane. She didn’t know what it was supposed to do- or even, she’d thought in her darker moments, whether she intended to come back. Some hopeful part of her thought it might make her feel better, that by visiting the past she might get some sort of closure, some kind of forgiveness.

She knew it was dumb. It was only in movies that things like that magically happened, but she was here now and she might as well go through with it.

Maddie thought she might go to sleep immediately- she was certainly tired enough- but already the water beckoned.

She stepped to the back of the house, taking out her iPhone. She put on her flashlight and crossed the short distance over the worn floorboards to the back door, listening to the heat clicking in the baseboards. The back door came open with a reluctant creak, and Maddie found herself standing on the stone path to the pond.

It was frozen over this time of year, thick white ice spread over its surface. Maddie’s light bounced off of a discarded branch near its center, the snow receding on the shoreline. It had been a while since they’d had a good storm. The dancing white light flickered over the trees beyond the far shore, catching the movement of some small forest animal as it crashed through the barren wood.

There were deer here sometimes. In the spring, they would lower their heads to the chill water and drink. Addie used to like to feed them.

The thought of Addie and the sight of the light glancing off of the ice was too much. She stepped to the edge of the pond even as she burrowed her free hand in her pocket, trying to warm it up.

They had played a game like this, that last year. She and Addie would take their dad’s utility flashlight out to the pond at night. It was January then, even colder than it was now. Both girls would step out onto the ice, shushing one another so as not to wake their parents.

Most of their games were Maddie’s idea, and this one was no different. She’d walk a distance on the ice, carefully testing its strength, and then she’d flick the light on and off once, letting her twin know she could follow. When Addie caught up, they’d stand together and survey the skating rink-world around them, and decide what direction to go in next. They called it the flashlight game. It was simple and kind of dumb, but Maddie remembered getting a type of thrill from it. They were explorers investigating uncharted territories secretly, under cover of darkness.

Maddie moved out onto the ice, her breath pluming out in front of her.

Addie had never been a big fan of the game, though she never said as much. In typical Addie fashion, she went along with whatever Maddie wanted to do, happy just to spend time with her twin.

Addie was always the agreeable one, the kind one, the thoughtful one. She was easygoing and sociable, unlike Maddie, who was often silent and sullen and had what her mother termed a ‘selfish streak’. Addie also had a kind of sixth sense, as their mother called it. She knew something was wrong when the family dog died, and whenever Maddie was sad or upset, she always seemed to be able to tell and would come over and attempt to comfort her.

The last Flashlight Game they ever played had been suggested by Addie, to appease her sister. Maddie was in a mood that night and Addie, as she always did, was attempting to cheer her up. Maddie could remember being reluctant to play, feeling spiteful and mean the way she sometimes did, the way Addie could never understand.

She wished, more than ever, that she could jump through time and erase what she’d done. How she’d shone the flashlight over a treacherous place in the ice, one where she could almost see the water flowing beneath, the finest of cracks sweating up into the cold air.

“I dare you,” she’d said to her sister, who stood there looking apprehensive before she took one slow, sliding step forward.

Who knows why she actually did it; sometimes Maddie felt angry with her for it, though she knew it was only her misplaced anger at herself. It wasn’t Addie’s fault that she was more likable; it wasn’t her fault that most of their shared friends were really only there for Addie. It wasn’t her fault that she only wanted to make her sister happy, and that sometimes her sister derived joy from the meanest of things.

In the nightmare that memory had become, it happened so suddenly. The ice giving way below Addie’s feet, the frightened look on her face right before she’d disappeared beneath the freezing water below.

Maddie can remember screaming, can remember calling for their parents, turning back toward the cottage, can remember a single light coming on downstairs.

The rest of that night was slow motion, like a rotten dream sequence unfolding. The arrival of the cops. The news, delivered to her in a musty, wood-paneled room. They didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already fear. Too late. Too far away. Died within the first ten minutes, probably, minutes in which no one but Maddie was there by her side, useless.

Now Maddie shuffled forward cautiously; the ice held, like a stubborn platform for her memories. They’d all been here equally on their trips to the cottage, occupied the same amount of space, but it didn’t seem like that now. Addie’s absence was larger than anyone’s presence could ever hope to be. The lack of her was everywhere; even her parents couldn’t say her name without saying the name of the one they lost, the one they probably wished she was instead. Even ten years later, her sister’s ghost followed her around relentlessly.

She reached the part of the pond where it happened all that time ago. It looked deceivingly innocuous, like any other part of the water. Except it wasn’t. Maddie gripped her phone in her frozen fingers and moved it as close to the surface of the pond as she could: there it was, that thin current of water pulsing beneath, that hairline crack running away from her.

In her mind’s eye she saw herself walk out on that surface, the final test.

I dare you.

She thought of the stricken faces of her parents, of the strangely small casket being lowered into its premature grave. Of the nearly empty bottle of ineffective pills. Of the guilty secret only she knew about that night.

Maddie didn’t realize she’d taken a step forward until she heard a threatening creak; suddenly, the ice around her lit up with a glow much stronger than the one coming from her smartphone.

She turned around, the ice giving another warning moan as she did so. The strange light flicked off again, but for just a second she could see it, a blaze of warmth several yards away: a flashlight, held aloft by a small, dark figure.

Though no one had struck her, Maddie felt the air leave her lungs, her body as frozen as the lake beneath. She felt tears prick at her eyes. The light turned on again, bathing the ice between them in blinding light, then winked off. Again she saw that figure, that familiar outline, though the only shadow spread between them was her own.

The light flicked on again, then off. Come this way.

Maddie took one step, then another, towards the impossible figure and its light. As she went, the flashlight in front of her continued to move back towards the shore, winking on and off in increments, giving her teasing snapshots of its wielder.

Only once she managed to open her mouth and speak into the frigid stillness between them.

“Addie?” she asked. There was no response, but in the flickering of the light she thought she saw the curve of a cheek, the ghost of a smile.

The figure stood now next to the path leading up to the cottage, flicked the light one final time, and turned as if to go inside. Maddie reached the shore again, letting out a breath she didn’t know she was holding, and closed her eyes for just one second. When she opened them again, her sister was gone, the only light the glowing box of the kitchen window of Thistle Cottage.

“Okay,” she muttered to herself, surprised to find there were tears sliding down her cheeks. “Okay.”

Suddenly she was exhausted. Maddie clicked the weak light from her phone off and went up the path towards bed and towards tomorrow, whatever that held.