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Hunt and Seek
Dark Lore Digest Prompt #15 — The Lantern Man
Dr. Aaron Pine clenched his jacket tighter. For the hundredth time, he wished Mrs. Pavlenko had asked the police for help instead of him. But the police didn’t find her daughter. Now, her husband was missing.
“Ducktor Pine, I ask it you because you are de only von who vas ever kind to me, Please Ducktor. Help me. No police.”
He’d listened, “Find de ‘lantern man’ and you vill find my Vitaly.”
He’d seen the lantern man just as Tammy had described: dwarfish, bearded and thick, carrying a lantern on what looked to be a horn-handled crook.
He wasn’t more than ten paces behind the squat character when the sickly yellow light vanished from sight. Moving quickly rather than carefully, Dr. Pine did the very wrong thing. The heavy, slurping, suctioning muck of the bog bottom gave way.
Panic came even before he’d opened his eyes. Cold steel clasped his neck, held by a heavy chain riding down his back. Decay, a scent he knew well, filled his nostrils. His eyes adjusted to the crude lights hooked into the ceiling, and Dr. Pine saw he was in a dank hole gouged into the earth.
“This one is sick,” croaked the dwarf-man. “Fix her or die.”
