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| A circle of salt. A single candle. And something waiting in the dark. |
A new original tale every week—twisted, terrifying, and inspired by the darkest legends you thought you knew.
The Return
The cabin had always smelled like cedar and lake water and something underneath both, something older, the way a place smells when it has held many summers and given none of them back. Katie pulled her car to a stop beside the dock as the first clouds of the evening were massing above the pines, gray and unhurried, in no rush to arrive.
Four of them had come up for the weekend—the last before fall semester pulled them in separate directions. The lake house was her parents', technically, though her parents hadn't used it in two years. Katie was the one who remembered the codes, who knew which burner ran slow, who knew that the third porch step creaked and had always creaked and probably always would.
Austin helped carry in the coolers. He'd been doing that since they were children, following her up these same porch steps, taking the same turn past the kitchen into the same back room that smelled of old paperbacks and boat cushions. There was a comfort in it that she had stopped noticing years ago and had recently, for reasons she couldn't name, begun noticing again.
They ate on the porch as the light failed. Lena and Drew were louder than the lake deserved, and Katie let their noise fill the spaces she didn't want to fill herself. The storm announced itself slowly: a drop in temperature, the trees going still, then the water going still, which always happened last and always felt wrong.
The power went out at nine forty-seven. Drew found candles in the kitchen drawer, as they always were, as they had always been. The cabin went amber and close, shadows pressing in at the edges of the light, and for a few minutes no one spoke.
It was Lena who said it first—not as a suggestion, just as a memory surfacing. She'd heard the story from Austin, or thought she had. The Midnight Game. The ritual.
Katie felt Austin go still beside her on the couch without looking at him.
"You two actually tried it once, didn't you," Lena said. "When you were kids."
"We were twelve," Katie said.
"Did it work?"
A pause. The candle between them guttered for no reason, then held.
"There was a storm," Austin said. "We stopped early."
Katie looked at him then. He was looking at the flame.
What Neither Had Said
Later, after Lena and Drew had gone upstairs, Katie and Austin sat across from each other in the candlelight and said the thing neither had said before.
"I thought you ended it," Katie said. "When the storm hit. I thought you did the closing properly."
"I thought you did."
She turned her water glass in her hands. Outside, the first rain began, unhurried drops tapping the porch railing. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
The Midnight Game had its rules. You wrote your name in blood on a piece of paper. You knocked twenty-two times on a door at midnight, snuffed the candle on the knock that followed. You walked through the dark house carrying the candle, keeping it lit, staying in motion. If the candle went out, you had ten seconds to relight it or pour salt around yourself and wait until dawn. At 3:33 in the morning, you blew out the candle and said the words that closed it.
They had not said the words.
"It's probably nothing," Austin said, though he didn't say it the way a person says something they believe. He said it the way a person says something they want to be true.
"Probably," Katie agreed.
"We could do it properly," he said. "Tonight. Close it the way we were supposed to."
She looked at the rain on the dark window. She thought about leaving it ten more years, twenty. She thought about what it felt like to wonder.
"Just us," she said. "Lena and Drew stay upstairs."
"Just us," he agreed.
Twenty-Two Knocks
They found paper in the kitchen drawer, beside the candles. The pin from a small sewing kit served for the blood—one quick prick on the pad of each thumb, their names pressed in rust-colored letters onto the page. Katie's handwriting was neat. Austin's was always slightly cramped, the letters leaning into each other.
They folded the papers and set them at the base of the front door.
At midnight exactly, Austin began to knock. Katie counted silently with him. The sound was dull in the storm-quiet house, each knock absorbed by old wood and old insulation, each one landing in the air and staying there. On the twenty-second knock, Katie extinguished the candle.
The darkness was absolute for a moment before her eyes adjusted to the thin gray light from the windows. Rain moved across the glass in slow diagonals. The cabin breathed around them, settling into itself the way old houses did, the way she'd always told herself was nothing.
She relit the candle.
They began to move.
The ritual asked for constant motion through the house, the candle carried before you, the dark kept at a distance of flickering light. They moved single-file—Katie first, Austin behind—through the kitchen, into the back hall, past the room with the old paperbacks, around through the dining area and back toward the front. The cabin wasn't large. The circuit took perhaps four minutes. They walked it again. And again.
The storm had gone briefly, eerily quiet. The kind of quiet that preceded something, though she couldn't have said what. The pine trees outside the window were perfectly still.
It was in the back hall that Austin's hip caught the edge of the side table. Not hard. The salt bowl barely shifted. But Katie heard the soft scrape of it, and when she held the candle down to look, she could see that the neat circle of salt they'd poured was imperfect on one side—not broken, just pressed, a small compression where the table had jolted.
"It's fine," Austin said quietly.
"Is it."
"It's not broken." His voice was steady but careful, the voice he used when he wasn't entirely certain. "A line is only broken if there's a gap."
She looked at the salt for another moment. Then she straightened and kept walking.
She didn't ask again. But she didn't stop thinking about it.
The Hours Between
By two in the morning, the rhythm of the walking had become almost trance-like. Their footsteps were the only sound, and even those seemed slightly muffled, as though the house had grown thick around them. Katie kept her eyes ahead of the candle flame, watching the small circle of light move across baseboards and doorframes and the familiar geography of a place she had known since childhood, which had become, in the last hour, subtly strange.
The candle guttered badly once, in the dining room, for no reason—no draft, no movement. The flame bent sideways and nearly went out. Katie stopped walking. Austin was behind her and she heard him stop too. The flame steadied. She exhaled.
Ten seconds, the rules said. She had counted to three.
They kept moving.
Around two-fifteen, a door opened upstairs. She heard it clearly—the particular sound of the guest room door, which had a slightly swollen frame and always dragged at the bottom. She and Austin both looked up at the ceiling involuntarily. Footsteps crossed the room above them. Then nothing.
In the morning, Lena would swear she never left the room. Drew would say he hadn't woken at all.
The worst of it was the doorways.
It was a feeling rather than a sight, and she knew better than to mistake one for the other—but each time she passed through a doorway, there was a density to the air on the other side. Not a figure. Not a shape. A quality of pressure, the sense that the darkness in a given threshold was slightly less empty than it had been the circuit before. She began to angle around doorframes rather than passing through their centers. She didn't mention this to Austin. She suspected he was doing the same.
The imperfect salt circle nagged at her, a splinter of unease she couldn't stop pressing against. The first ritual, when they were twelve, had not been closed. Ten years of whatever that meant. And now the circle not quite right, the line not quite whole.
She could no longer remember who had blown out the candle at twelve. She remembered the darkness. She remembered the thunder. She did not remember the flame going out.
She did not say any of this aloud. She kept walking. She kept the candle lit.
3:33
They reached the salt circle at three twenty-eight and sat down inside it on the kitchen floor, backs almost touching, the candle between them. The circle was the final protection, the last threshold. Whatever moved through the house could not cross salt.
She looked at the compressed side of the circle and looked away.
The storm had resumed, quiet and steady, rain on the roof a sound so familiar it was almost nothing. They didn't speak. The time between three-twenty-eight and three-thirty-three was the longest five minutes Katie had experienced since childhood.
The clock on the microwave—running on the backup battery—turned to 3:33.
Katie said the words. Austin said them with her. She blew out the candle.
Darkness.
Rain.
Nothing moved. No door opened. No sound that did not belong.
After a full minute, the power came back on with a mechanical thunk from the basement, the refrigerator resuming its hum, the porch light flooding the window yellow. Upstairs, a floorboard creaked—Lena, probably, woken by the lights. Then footsteps on the stairs, and both of them came down in sleep-creased clothes asking if everything was all right.
"Fine," Katie said. "We're fine."
She believed it. Nearly.
Morning
The lake was flat and silver at seven in the morning, the storm having taken everything with it when it left. Katie came downstairs alone, the others still sleeping, and put the kettle on. The cabin smelled like cedar again, like lake water, like itself.
She almost didn't look at the floor.
The salt circle was still there, mostly. She'd meant to sweep it last night and hadn't. The greater part of it was intact, the white line faint but continuous. Except for the compressed section in the back hall, which she already knew about, and which she'd already told herself was not broken.
But there was something else. Something she hadn't noticed in the dark.
Along the inner edge of the circle—the side that faced inward, toward where they'd sat—the salt had been disturbed in a pattern that moved from one end of the curve to the other, as though something had stood at the boundary and pressed gently against it from outside. Not breaking through. Not breaking the line. Just pressing. Just close.
She stood looking at it for a long time.
When Austin came downstairs, he poured himself coffee and leaned against the counter and said something about the drive home, about traffic on 41 this time of year. She turned to answer him and caught his reflection in the lake-facing window behind him—the dark water making a mirror of the glass.
The reflection was almost right.
Almost. For just a fraction of a second, too brief to be certain, it lagged. His body turned; the reflection followed an instant behind, like an echo of a movement rather than the movement itself. Then it caught up and was only his reflection, ordinary, unremarkable.
She looked at the window a moment longer. Then she looked at him.
"Ready when you are," she said.
An hour later she locked the cabin and walked to her car without looking at the lake. She did not look at the lake. She told herself it was because there was nothing there to see.
She told herself that for a long time after.
© 2026 Karen Cody. All rights reserved. This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog. Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission. This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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