The Candle

By Rudi Basson, aged 9

There was no moon in the sky that night and the wind was watching us like a hawk.

Luke and I had wandered into the woods on the other side of the estate and were trying to find a comfortable place to sit down and eat a packet of Halloween Haribos. After several minutes of drifting around the infinite darkness, we glimpsed a splinter of light coming from a mouldy wooden house.

Luke, stuck to the ground, was desperate to not knock on the door, even though there was a pumpkin on the dead windowsill.

“It’s for sweets,” I explained rushing to the dark oak door.

“But I saw it in a dream!” he choked. “I’ve seen this before… I’m sure I have.”

“It’s familiar to me as well but I’m not scared of it, wimp.”

As I knocked on the door I felt a rush of fright down my spine: the door had opened at an instant but there was nobody there. Luke was clinging on to my shoulders breathing like a mad scientist. Cautiously, we finally made it into the creaking hallway. I had the nerve to shout out, “Hello is anybody there?” but still nobody answered.

Luke whispered in my ear, “We should get out of here.”

“Scaredy-cat. We’ll be fine.”

Suddenly, it dawned on us the pumpkin had gone dark so I clambered for the torch and my thumb shook to switch it on. Shinning the beam on the wall, I saw about two hundred pictures in glistening golden frames.

I stepped down the line of pictures and realised each one had a name and a date. The first one I looked at had a girl dressed in a mummy suit and, with all the sweat on her forehead, her bandages were slipping off her face, white and peaked. I read the year and name: 2014 Hannah Morrison.

I followed Luke’s startled gaze onto another picture of a boy in a Dracula costume screaming, fake fangs and scarlet face paint as dripping blood, and once again I read the year and name: 2015 Lucas Rover.

Suddenly we both realised that each frame contained a detailed portrait of a screaming child in front of a table and dead candle, burnt down to the wick-end. Our heads turned as one and we both stared at the frame of 2016. All it held was the table bearing a lit candle. I read the date and name: 2016 __________.It was blank!

In shock, I stumbled over my feet and tumbled into a crumbling, fragile bookcase. Like it was smashed with an axe, the bookshelf separated into two! Behind lay a pitch black room. Within it a damaged table with a candle on it, burning quickly. Then it hit us: it was the candle from the background of the pictures.

It doesn’t take a detective to figure out what that means: we were next! And that was the last time I ever saw Luke or anybody ever again.